Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mother-love can turn to diabolical mother-rage when a woman's child is hurt or killed.  I knew a mother who lost her son in a stabbing after a bar-fight.  The woman carried in her purse autopsy pictures showing the boy cut apart on a stainless steel table at the hospital.  She would show these pictures to strangers and ask them if they thought it unjust that the killer had not been prosecuted for stabbing her son.  (The killer was acquitted on a plea of self-defense.)  In the end, she confronted local law enforcement authorities who she thought had botched the case:  she threatened the wives and children of those cops with the evisceration pictured in the autopsy pictures, was prosecuted for terrorist threats, and went to prison herself, snarling and proud of her loyalty to the memory of her lost son. 

Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri takes this grave, and tragic subject, a mother's obsessive quest for revenge, as its theme.  Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman whose daughter was raped and killed and her body, then, burned on a lonely road in rural Missouri. Hayes is outraged that her daughter's slaughter has not been avenged and she vents her fury on the local police chief, a man named Willoughby (played with surprising restraint by Woody Harrelson).  Everyone in the small town of Ebbing knows that the much-beloved Willoughby is dying of pancreatic cancer and the local people are almost universally outraged when Hayes pays for three billboards denouncing the sheriff near the place where her daughter's body was found.  Pressure is exerted on Mildred to remove the billboards but she is Nemesis herself or, perhaps, the fury Allecto --she will not be dissuaded from her righteous pursuit of justice and this leads to a cascade of violent events including, at last, several terrible beatings and the fire-bombing of the Ebbing police station.  (She is a little like Michael Kohlhass in Heinrich von Kleist's ferocious novella -- Kleist calls Kohlhass "at once the most righteous and most terrifying man in Germany" and the same epithets ("righteous and terrifying") could be applied to Mildred.) Mildred's utter refusal to compromise makes her a profound and great tragic figure and the movie has an excellent beginning, a mournful and beautiful overture as it were, as well as some fairly moving scenes in its last twenty minutes.  But overall the movie is botched.  This is lamentable because there is the kernel of a great film in the subject and McDormand's acting is extraordinary -- she makes no effort to endear herself to the audience and, therefore, achieves a great and austere nobility.  (No mind that she's essayed this kind of role before in the HBO mini-series Olive Kittridge.) Unfortunately, the whole movie is horribly spoiled by Martin McDonagh's childish self-indulgence.  This is the kind of movie that confuses critics -- it's full of tremendous acting and wild harangues and the camera-work is unobtrusively beautiful (a few too many close-ups for my taste but justified by the Oscar-worthy performances in the film.)  The fundamental problem with the film is that it is wholly, and inexcusably implausible and wildly over-written. 

First, everyone in the film speaks in a torrent of obscenities.  This is not the way people talk in the deep south.  (McDonagh, whose geographical understanding of the US seems imprecise, apparently thinks that Missouri is like Mississippi or Alabama; he doesn't grasp that Missouri is a southern-inflected Midwestern state.)  Everyone curses relentlessly and unrealistically -- the whole film is scripted in sub-Tarantino obscenities and, often, the need to make dirty jokes or end a confrontation with a filthy (if clever) epithet drives the action.  Two examples will suffice for about a dozen instances where McDonagh's desire to lard his dialogue with politically incorrect and offensive jokes contorts what we are seeing on the screen.  Mildred's ex-husband is going out with a 19 year old girl.  The girl is said to be a zoo attendant.  This weird vocation is a source of a baker's dozen dirty jokes about monkey shit and how the girl smells of that substance.  But I have news for McDonagh -- there aren't going to be any zoos within hailing distance of the boondocks shown in the film.  It's an example of McDonagh hearing a dirty joke in a pub in Dublin, let's say, and wanting to transpose that jest to the American Midwest -- it just doesn't work.  Similarly, we are treated to a long and picturesque harangue about pedophile priests -- this is also totally incongruous.  The people in the part of the country shown in the film are Assembly of God parishioners, Methodists, or Baptists -- it seems unwarranted and self-indulgent for McDonagh to insert in the film a long speech comparing the Catholic Church to the Bloods and the Crips.  He seems to have got the speech in the wrong movie.  There are inexplicable screw-ups in the plotting.  Woody Harrelson's dying sheriff has a much, much younger wife -- at one point, I was confused with a erotic gesture made by Willoughby to the woman who I took to be his daughter.  Worse, Willoughby's wife sometimes speaks with a southern accent -- other times, she inexplicably seems to have a strong British accent.   She is so young that there is something marginally creepy about the relationship.  And the role for the sheriff's wife is completely underwritten -- in one scene, Willoughby is spitting blood due to the progression of his cancer.  His young wife agrees wholeheartedly that he should check himself out of the hospital notwithstanding his doctor's objections -- this is totally incredible and makes you wonder whether the girl has lost her senses.  Another completely botched element in the movie relates to the cost of the billboards.  The three billboards are on a rural lane that "no one but lost people and morons use" -- but, incredibly, the charge for renting those three billboards is 5000 dollars a month.  (I would think you could get three billboards on the Santa Monica Freeway for 5000 a month.)  The price has to be enormous because one of the plot elements involves Mildred Hayes having trouble raising the money to finance her PR campaign against the hapless sheriff.  Later, Willoughby commits suicide and sends Mildred $5000 in cash so that she can keep on the campaign against him post-mortem -- but this gesture, which seems credible in context, doesn't make any sense if considered rationally:  why would Willoughy deprive his widow and two little girls of the $5000 merely to play a crazy posthumous game with Mildred Hayes?  (The people in the film are poor -- $5000 is regarded as a fortune to the denizens of Ebbing, Missouri).  A little later, the widow confronts Mildred Hayes accusing her of causing her husband's death.  But we have seen, and heard read Willoughby's suicide note in which he adamantly and with absolute accuracy denies that the billboards denouncing him had anything to do with his death.  Did the widow not read the suicide note?  Or is she ignoring it?  Or is McDonagh amping up the volume and the vehemence in the hope that we don't notice the incongruity?

Ultimately, the problem with the film all relates to its mawkish sentimentality.  There's a wide vein of Irish blarney in this film and most often it is expressed in the kind of sentimental gestures that would have embarrassed John Ford at his most expansive.  All of the relentless cursing and blackguard diction is a vain attempt to conceal the film's soft underbelly of rather craven sentimentality.  Willoughby takes his wife on a picnic to the river, goes off to make love with her in the woods, and, so, has to leave his two little girls fishing on the banks of the stream.  He cows the little girls by bellowing at them to not leave the "goddamned blanket for any goddamned purpose" and also orders them to be careful with the rods and reels so that they don't get "hooks in (their) goddamned eye-balls."  First, of course, no one would speak to children in this way (the little girls are about 4 and 6) -- second, all the intemperate cursing is just an attempt to deny the fundamentally sentimental nature of the scene, poor Willoughby's pastoral farewell to his wife and his life.  (He shoots himself that night).  Willoughby's suicide note is similarly flawed -- it's full of tough guy obscenity that is deployed to mask what is really a very sentimental and standard sort of love note.  Once this strategy is detected by the viewer, it's abundantly obvious -- the more vehement and absurdly obscene the language, the more sentimental the gesture or action depicted.  The bad language is just a smoke-screen.  And, in one scene, we see a psychopathic cop (brilliantly played by Sam Rockwell) saying goodbye to his "dear old Mither."  He tenderly strokes her air before departing on his vigilante quest.

McDonagh, undoubtedly believes he's a genius writing profane Mamet-style dialogue -- he uses a diction derived from Mamet, filtered through some Harold Pinter, and, then, cast in terms that derive from Tarantino films.  A lot of his dialogue is fairly clever but it completely misconstrues the way people in Missouri or, for that matter, anywhere in the USA talk.  (The film features high green mountains that don't look like any part of Missouri that I've scene -- in fact, the picture was shot in Appalachian mountains in one of the two Carolinas.)  This film is fascinating, but it's wrecked by the director's conception of himself as a tough-guy truthteller -- he's absolutely tone-deaf with respect to the way Americans talk.