A Mess...An Entertaining, Provocative Mess

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2018)

McDonagh (In Bruges) revels in shoving tragedy and comedy right against each other, and he does so with immense ease and an awareness that that delicate balance of the two is what real-life is made of. With Three Billboards, he's trying to marry that authenticity with a heightened sense of storytelling, specifically in the stylized dialogue and detailed characters. This exercise results in some inescapable messiness throughout the movie, yet there's so much compelling and highly entertaining filmmaking on display here you barely notice.
McDormand turns in a powerhouse performance as a vengeful Midwestern mom who buys three billboards in her town that shame local law enforcement for not doing enough to find the man who raped and killed her daughter. With dark subject matter and colorful humor bedding together, it's not an easy movie to take in. Yet despite the film's groove taking a minute to find, those complexities that make it difficult are what make it great. A lovely look at what small-town America really acts like, the characters' motivations and intentions are revealed slowly, and there's not a bad performance in the bunch. Harrelson's character is strongly upright yet deeply sad, and Rockwell brings immense depth to his racist, drunk Barney Fife role.
And the film's edges are as rough as its characters. Metaphors are thinly veiled, characters change when needed, subtext becomes text. However, because the movie, at its core, is just a morality tale, everything is there to support its main point: tragedy changes lives, but vengeance destroys them. And luckily that central message is more open-ended, allowing the movie to sit with its audience long after the individual issues have been washed away.