Here, McDonagh’s attempts to refer to hot-button topics feel like afterthoughts, with issues such as police brutality and racism being thrown about but never really looked at.
Where Three Billboards begins to topple over is at around the halfway mark of its slightly-too-long 115-minute runtime. In terms of aesthetics, the cinematography courtesy of Ben Davis ( Kick-Ass, Doctor Strange) is dingy yet warm, often making good use of highlighted, bold lighting choices confined to the environments depicted onscreen. Nevertheless, he maintains a great deal of respect for those involved and understands the humanity of them this is again brought by through strong work from the aforementioned supporting players. McDonagh’s auteurist dialogue generally carries on here, a mashup of silliness and sardonicism that runs over, under, and through its characters as they duel with one another using the guns that are their respective tongues. Powered by a electric performance from McDormand, it’s in turns darkly comical and perversely inspiring, the protagonist’s no-nonsense, truth-to-power rhetoric a great example of how to write a realistic woman with a great amount of agency and fundamental flaws at her core.
What fuels the first 30 minutes or so is what by and large fuels the overall film. Taking inspiration from vigilante and rape-revenge tales, it’s something of a maddening movie, often undoing its own greatness over and over again. Her actions instigate varying degrees of controversy, her intent to avenge her daughter proving to implicate others and test the worldviews of herself and those around her. Given that the local law enforcement, consisting of Sheriff William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), hasn’t solved the crime nor even pursued it enough to create the illusion of justice, Mildred rents out three billboards on a stretch of rural road where the crime occurred. Taking place in the titular location, McDonagh’s ( In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) latest follows Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), a woman whose daughter Angela (Kathryn Newtown) was raped and murdered seven months earlier.
It flirts with social satire only to rush back to the shallow end of the pool. It’s good in short bursts, but it’s also a mess in tone and scope that doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is, in a way, what he has been working towards in terms of drama, and yet the product is less than the sum of its parts. Martin McDonagh’s previous work has thrived off of the seemingly antithetical ways in which people behave under heightened experiences.
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