Indulgent, Afraid of Sentimentality

Rating: 3/10 (19 March 2018)

The talented cast and occasional idyllic images of rural Missouri, not to mention Renee Fleming's beautiful rendition of "Last Rose of Summer," can't save this indulgent movie. I know: the whole point is to mock violence, indulge violence, and comment on our obsession with violence while implying the need for justice. But a movie has to be willing to take a stance, risk sentimentality, and risk being moral if it wants to be successful-if it wants to be more than artful and "original." Over-the-top violence is never funny to my sensibility, and I think it says more about our collective inability to solve our mass shooting problem and pervasive social-psychological disconnection (preferring social media to real intimacy) than it does the movie's sophistication. When police chief Sam Rockwell knocks the kid off the roof and then goes down to the street to kick him into the hospital, camera's viewpoint where his gun would be holstered, it's disgusting, pointless, and not at all funny to this viewer. That they meet later in the hospital is supposed to function as some kind of double irony and edgy rapprochement, but it's simply exhausting. And that tired device--hideousness as humor, gratuitousness as art-is getting very tired.
I'm reminded of the popular movie "Sideways" (2004)--no likeable characters, no one I'd like to spend time with, no one I admire. And yet the popular consensus in that case, as in this one, said the movie was so hilarious and that it was true on some level, or so true that it was hilarious. In truth, the joke was on us in that we found losers funny because we saw ourselves in them. Truth in "Three Billboards" would have been the Francis McDormand character, Mildred, getting out of the car instead of agreeing to travel with Sam to Idaho to act out their vengeance against the sociopath who, it turns out, didn't commit the rape of her daughter. Clearly, he's not a good guy, and the movie could have meditated on that more meaningfully, instead of turning him into yet another wrongfully accused but rightly unappealing character, righteous now that he has been brutally attacked for something he didn't do. I know: the movie leaves the outcome of their own private Idaho ambiguous. They set off together, but some of their drive for revenge has dissipated. But in this movie, no two people talk to each other in any meaningful way, for that wouldn't be artful. How much more compelling the ending would be if she got out of the car, for example, and walked home. (It's also not very plausible that all the parallels between the war vet and the actual killer are merely coincidental, but that's part of the movie's pretense to high art, its subverting of a cliché--Shane overhearing the Ryker brothers in the darkened saloon.)
The only decent character is the new chief, the black officer come to replace Dixon (Sam Rockwell) for his incompetence and inability to channel or heal his rage. The message here seems to be PC--all white people in the movie are rotten, horribly flawed, at the very least limited. The man in the white hat is black. That's a nice twist on an old cliché, but the social commentary is about as subtle as, well, renting three billboards to send a message to law enforcement to find a daughter's rapist/murderer. For God's sake (don't worry; I'm an atheist), don't be so afraid of a true character arc, one that offers the viewer a different lens, something better than: the white hoi polloi are all, as a class, backwater brutes. In the end, what else can an enraged mother (who was herself abusive) do? She can have a change of heart. Or she can find and confront her daughter's killer. But that's too prosaic for this too-cool-for-school best picture nominee.