Movie Reaction: Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Formula: A Time to Kill / In Bruges * Manchester by the Sea

It's really hard to make a good messy movie. It's easy to make a bad one. I'm pretty sure calling a movie a complete mess is among the most common things I say in a really negative Reaction. A good mess is tricky. Naturally, a storyteller thinks in a linear fashion, almost like an equation. There needs to be a beginning, middle, and end. Something that's introduced at the beginning needs to be wrapped up by the end. It's hard to start something and decide that it doesn't need to be finished. It's like trying to end a sentence without a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Not only is it like ending a story with a sentence that's missing a punctuation mark. It's also making the audience totally OK with that decision, which is what makes that kind of movie so tough to pull off.

Martin McDonagh is great at making messy movies. I haven't immediately loved his first two movies, In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. However, they are definitely messy movies with conflicted characters and stories that aren't very neat. I haven't seen any of McDonagh's plays, but I suspect they are the same. Three Billboard Outside Ebbing, Missouri is his messiest movie yet and by far my favorite for how well it handles it.

Three billboards indeed are at the center of this film.  Frances McDormand plays Mildred, the mother of a girl who was killed months ago. She rents three billboards and puts of a message on them that challenges the Ebbing police department and, more specifically, police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for not solving the murder yet. Mildred accepts becoming the town pariah for going after the beloved police chief if it means something will get done about her daughter's case. She's not out of line for thinking that the police department is too busy with racist practices either. They continue to employ a dimwitted officer (Sam Rockwell) who is known throughout town for torturing an African American man in custody.  It's hard to say what the plot of the movie is beyond that. It's really just seeing how the town reacts to the billboards and watching the dominoes fall.  What makes it especially messy is how no one is particularly likable. Mildred had plenty of issues even before her daughter died, with an ex-husband who left her for a much younger woman and children (now just a son) she had a volatile relationship with. Chief Willoughby is perhaps the one wholly good person involved, yet he's staked a lot of his reputation supporting Rockwell's repugnant officer Dixon. 

The film is overflowing with terrific performances, Frances McDormand first among them. I tend to forget how good the Oscar winner is, and this is a great reminder. She's tough as nails yet also incredibly vulnerable if hit at just the right angle. Woody Harrelson is always great, and this is no exception, despite having a less prominent role than I expected. Rockwell gives the kind of performance that made Crash a Best Picture winner a decade ago and he's tremendous doing it. He manages to redeem his character without actually improving him. Everyone else - Lucas Hedges, Zeljko Ivanek, Abbie Cornish, Caleb Landry Jones, Darren Britt-Gibson, and Peter Dinklage - do great work in limited time.
 
My favorite thing about the movie is how it balances being a deeply emotional movie with pitch-black dark comedy.  In the same scene I could be holding my breathe from the tension then laughing in disbelief at something a character (normally Mildred or officer Dixon) said. "Life's not fair" is kind of the ethos of the movie, which means certain scenes and stories end in an unsatisfying but honest fashion. Specifically, I'm thinking of the lone flashback to before Mildred's daughter died. There are many examples though. The movie is doing a lot and leaves plenty still unsettled. I did get everything I needed in just the right measure.

If it isn't obvious yet, I strongly approve of this movie. I'm hesitant to use the word "like" because it's such a prickly film. Everything this movie was doing worked for me. This is the movie I've been waiting for McDonagh to make for years and I'm happy I didn't wait at all to see it. It may not be my favorite movie of the year, but it's one of the one's I'll be thinking about the most.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend