So Many Things

Rating: 10/10 (12 March 2018)

Frick. I loved this. Just awesome! I didn't just enjoy the performance, which was certainly stellar, I also loved its multi-layered themes.
The first thing that stood out to me as I began reminiscing over the film afterwards was how the film doesn't have a definitive ending, not something that plot-wise neatly wraps up the film, but only the lesser chaos that remains after the tempestuous few months since Mildred Hayes put up those three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Perhaps, though, it was a neat conclusion, telling us that we indeed can leave the chaos of our lives be, and not try to necessarily fix them. Or that, perhaps, our emotions are truly what matter in the end-that what we do about our long-term emotions to make them healthy are what we should do, even if that doesn't necessarily go along with our short-term emotions of sorrow, guilt, regret, and hatred, which tire us out and don't achieve much in the end for a solution to a problem?
So should all this trouble that Mildred went through have happened in the first place? Was it necessary? Or at least helpful to her? What if Willoughby didn't kill himself? What exactly was Willoughby's motivation for killing himself? A mix of hopelessness at his cancer's development, pressure and responsibility for finding Angela Hayes, pain to see his wife suffer through his worsening conditions, revenge for Mildred's billboards? All could be possibilities, though I can at least tell that this suicide wasn't just as simple as his three letters have shown. That there was, or should have been, more implicit motivations behind this suicide-this turning point in Mildred's and Dixon's lives.
Which reminds me. I loved this film in another part due to Mildred's growth as a character. From a more or less calloused person to a traumatized mother grieving her daughter's death, to someone going all out to persevere towards her goal, to someone who begins to pay attention and understand others better, to, in the end, a much more tempered person, though, at this point, still reluctantly so. I just hope that she keeps this better sense of others in her for longer into the future.