LAUGHTER AND TEARS
Perfect screenplay, perfect performances and subtle messaging, perfectly on point
The winner of the Toronto festival’s People’s Choice Award — a guarantee of a best-picture Oscar nomination since 2012 — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri also makes good on the old cliché: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.
The tears — for this hardened critic, at least — came midway through the movie, when Woody Harrelson’s complicated character, Ebbing’s police chief Willoughby, writes a letter to his wife. (The sign-off is the kicker.) And the laughs started early and kept rolling. All of which is weird when you consider that the advertising triptych in question is calling out Willoughby for failing to solve a case of rape and murder.
Then again, Irish writerdirector Martin McDonagh has long had a habit of wringing uneasy chuckles from dark circumstances, beginning on the stage (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, etc.), and moving to cinema with In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, stories of murder and better-late-thannever redemption.
His newest, mixing the specific (the southern state of Missouri) and the fictional (the one-stoplight town of Ebbing) features some of the most intriguing characters you’ll see on a screen this year. Frances McDormand heads up the cast as Mildred Hayes, whose anger and guilt over the unsolved murder of her daughter has festered into an incendiary rage. So she visits the local advertising rep (Caleb Landry Jones) with her request to rent three billboards, so out-ofthe-way the last thing they advertised was probably Chuck Norris action figures.
Mildred’s message makes the local news and stirs up local enmity, not least from Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who serves under Willoughby and hides his deeply racist soul beneath a veneer that is merely vaguely racist.
Mildred gives as good as she gets — often better — in rants laced with profanity and more than a little violence. It’s as if, having realized that nothing in this world or the next will bring her daughter back, she’s lost all sense of decorum. Not that all those with whom she interacts are worthy of her respect or politesse, although Peter Dinklage’s sweet, lonely character surely deserves better.
McDonagh’s genius is evident in the way he tugs and pushes the boundaries of good behaviour, often providing just enough motivation to mess with our sense of what’s justified, and when. One character who wouldn’t hurt a fly does a terrible thing to a dentist; another finds a most creative way to get the last word in an argument; and the message that hate only begets more hate is delivered by a character who is arguably the film’s dimmest bulb, and who read it not in a book, but on a bookmark.
In these and a thousand tinier ways, and backed by such soulful songs as Townes Van Zandt’s Buckskin Stallion Blues, the ebb of Ebbing swirls into a delicious undertow, a message of forgiveness delivered by a firebrand. McDonagh’s screenplay is sheer perfection.
McDormand’s commanding performance makes us believe her character leans over an abyss, momentum having pushed her beyond the point of no return. And the film convinces us that, physics be damned, there’s always a way back.