Blood for tears

Rating: 8/10 (20 June 2018)

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is a profane poem that stares genuinely in the face of grief, despair, and vengeance. It is ideally viewed as a complex meditation of a mother's most primal pain and path of redemption. The film squats into vile pain, the very burning embers of grief and derogatory assumptions that shape the very narrative of the movie while unchaining small realities and profound realities through its course. We get a rather intricate painting painted mostly in grey which specifically decorates on the cruelties born within societies and how immortally they tend to last.
Mildred (Francis McDormand) lost her daughter when the girl was raped, murdered and set ablaze. A trio of old, battered and dusty billboards stand in the misty morning fog on a sparsely traveled road which piques Mildred's interest to take a stand to pursue justice for her departed daughter. She displays no dubiousness to adorn the billboards with the words- "Still no arrests?", "How come, Chief Willoughby?" Topped with "Raped while dying". The billboards were a clear attack on the complacency Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and his police force displayed on her daughter's case, leading to Willoughby losing his mind over it, and that is where the movie leads.
Woody Harrelson carefully tailored his character to have the "tough-but-tender" outlook, which is something we don't see often from him. The dying, conflicted cop attitude simply added depth to his character when his sympathy projected towards Mildred and his futile efforts to find the culprits responsible for her daughter's death. Francis McDormand's character confidently stood its ground, with a very relatable embodiment of a woman on whom the walls of grief have zeroed in, which seemed unbreakable and impenetrable. Her fluent approach to shifting between comedy and tragedy even in the most disturbing situations makes her performance a soulfully convincing one, a standout. Nixon, a low IQ, mama's boy, the racist cop has perhaps one of the most interesting character arcs ever witnessed. His periodic transformation throughout the film was remarkable, even non-feasible seeming at times yet never crossing the lines of credibility. The showcasing of how his path converges with Mildred proves there's hope for humanity after all.
The movie often plays its violent delights alongside dark comedy twisting laughs that kindle the dark humor in us in depressing and surprising ways. The juxtaposition of these two raw elements provokes us to question the very losses we have faced in life and adding a layer of reality. The obscure narrative simply overrides any form of clichéd theatricality which is something very fresh in the genre considering it is a movie mainly driven by emotions (even though it is of a singular person).
The premise never vacillates to unfold its seemingly simple plot with different subsets, be it racism, male chauvinism, acceptance, incompetency or even disregard of civil rights. The lightest of colors of hope successfully manage to deceive and fade into black and white and eventually feeding most of the grey. All of its plot, elements, characters, and arcs are painted in big, bold black letters in a blood red background in the bleak but beautiful fictional town Ebbing.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is masqueraded by the vague outline of a revenge film, yet it kaleidoscopically manages to shift its ambitions and emotions leading to a less reckless ending. It is a carefully choreographed tribal dance around the fire about female righteousness and masculine power. One of its successes is owed to the testing of your very perspective about how we tend to judge people unknowingly of what truly drives them. A food for thought watch owing to its provocative subject matter and eclectic performances.