OVP: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Film: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Stars: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges
Director: Martin McDonagh
Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Frances McDormand*, Supporting Actor-Woody Harrelson, Supporting Actor-Sam Rockwell*, Film Editing, Score, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Modern culture is strange in terms of how we assess film.  In a deeply, politically-charged world where literally everything anyone does can be met with the height of people screaming from the rooftops (I'm not even a little bit immune here, though I've been trying to check myself lately), it's interesting to watch how other people's reactions to a film can affect our own, and how something as immersive as sitting, alone, in a quiet theater can occasionally result in you not noticing the politics of what you're viewing until you're out of the theater.  This was my initial thought on Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a movie whose rough edges don't hang well when you let them sit for a while, but undeniably has some interesting moments & framing devices.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film's plot is relatively straight-forward.  Mildred Hayes (McDormand), after her daughter is raped-and-murdered but the suspect is not brought to justice, puts up three billboards outside of her town calling out Police Chief Willoughby (Harrelson) for not making enough progress in the case.  As these things do in modern culture, the media picks up on the story and the police department are at a standoff of sorts with Hayes and the legality of her calling out the police chief, with one particular office Jason Dixon (Rockwell) taking a lot of chagrin to Hayes's actions.  The film unfolds with Willoughby committing suicide as he's suffering from terminal cancer, and both Jason & Mildred coming to terms with their shortcomings, eventually setting off to kill a man they suspect of raping a woman, though not Mildred's daughter (the film doesn't ever reveal who killed her daughter, and we're largely left to believe no one will ever know).

The film has a lot of complicated questions hanging over it, and this is almost certainly where the controversies surrounding the film started.  After all, we live in a world where we answer questions in a 140 (err, 280)-character soundbyte, and that doesn't really allow for nuance.  Some of these controversies I think are interesting.  I like the way that they handle McDormand's reaction to her daughter, and the fact that, she's right-the longer you keep a case in the public eye, the longer our ADD-addled media will focus on it (making it more likely that there's an arrest).  Some of the film's comments on the media are dead-on, and I think creative protesting is always interesting (and easily duplicated, apparently).

That said, the film's problems lie more in the controversies surrounding Sam Rockwell's Jason Dixon, and the film's inability to handle a heightened reality.  It's hard to judge Rockwell's performance (he's the strong favorite for this Sunday's Academy Awards), as his character is so poorly written, and I'm kind of flummoxed how this is the performance that both won the longtime character actor his first round of accolades as well as that he's besting both his (significantly better) costar Harrelson & the miles-ahead-of-him Willem Dafoe.  Dixon is outwardly, and near constantly racist, driven in part by an odious mother who has a nasty relationship with her son.  He's had multiple instances where he abused his power to hurt the African-American community in his town, and yet is still on the force.  That's not uncommon in this day-and-age (Black Lives Matter is a movement for a reason), but the film handles his racism callously.  In a lot of ways it reminded me of Matt Dillon's work in Crash, where we're expected to dismiss all of the hate that was in his heart earlier in the film because he has a sick father (in Rockwell's case, a domineering mother), but I'm not buying it.  No character gets away with being the proper hero here (only Lucas Hedges' Robbie can clearly be called innocent on all accounts in the film), but the ending where he is now tied to the "root for her" character of Mildred rang super false to me, and made me wonder what was the point of McDonagh's script.  Sharp banter and wordplay are injected in this film with relish, but that doesn't make up for some serious gaps in its plotting.

And while the dismissive attitude toward racism may be the film's most egregious sin, it's not the picture's only one.  For starters, it's never clear how grounded we are in reality here.  One could argue that in a highly-conservative rural town, that John Hawkes' character might get away with burning down the billboards or that Sam Rockwell might get away with mistreating the black community (this is wrong, but not without a toe in reality), but Mildred Hayes would have ended up in jail long before she and Jason became Thelma-and-Louise.  After all, she clearly burned down the police station, and assaulted three teenagers in broad daylight.  The film wants to be both a grounded drama AND be in the vein of some of McDonagh's past works like In Bruges, where it creates its own heightened reality.  You can't have it both ways, and the ending of the film doesn't jive with these moments.  Combined with a lot of very convenient plot points (Jason just happens to be in a that bar when he has a complete dead-end...I mean, come on!), this is lazy writing from McDonagh, a filmmaker who is way better than that as In Bruges proved a decade ago.

That said, this is not a film without merit, and I get why people like it.  A disappointing ending doesn't stop the fact that the story at its center is compelling.  McDormand carries the picture well, even if I didn't care for Rockwell (who is not a supporting part, and I'm not hearing enough people point that out), and I love some of the places she took the performance.  There's a great scene about halfway through when we get an insight into her relationship with her daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton), and realize some of her anger is aimed at herself, and that Angela wasn't the cherubic girl we assume earlier in the film when we assume she's similar to Robbie, but instead the "bad girl" who is so often blamed by the plot for her actions.  It seems odd that McDonagh takes a more progressive stance when it comes to his treatment of women than of race, but it's out there.  I also loved McDormand's unspoken history with John Hawkes, showing the strange pull of both loving-and-hating a man (both actors nail their parts), and while I wouldn't have nominated him, Harrelson continues to be one of the under-sung character actors of our era, giving a great first-half arc to his part.

It has to be said that while I'm giving this a low score, it didn't start that way.  Some movies age well in the memory, others you are forced to pick apart when someone points out obvious flaws in their structure and when you suddenly realize that you were swept up in the fine acting and quick banter.  Three Billboards is one of those pictures, so while I get why it might win the Oscar on Sunday (it's not a movie that's as obviously bad as say Crash was a decade ago), it's still not an appropriate Best Picture winner.