The Way of the World

Rating: 8/10 (9 March 2018)

Three Billboards...." is set in the fictitious small town of Ebbing, ostensibly in Missouri although location shooting actually took place in North Carolina. Grieving over the murder of her daughter Angela, and angered by the failure of the authorities to find the murderer, a local woman named Mildred Hayes rents three abandoned billboards just outside the town and posts placards reading "Raped While Dying", "And Still No Arrests?", and "How Come, Chief Willoughby?" This last is a reference to Bill Willoughby, the town's Chief of Police.
If the film were made according to the standard Hollywood rulebook, it would be a sentimental tearjerker. The Hayes household would be the idealised all-American family and Mildred the devoted all-American mom, with the lazy, incompetent Sheriff Willoughby the villain of the piece; the film would end with Mildred's persistence vindicated, Willoughby sacked and the perpetrator of the crime brought to justice. Fortunately, this is Martin McDonagh's film is one which ignores the rules.
To begin with, Mildred's family are far from idealised. In fact, they are deeply dysfunctional. Mildred's abusive husband Charlie has recently left her for a 19-year-old girl. Their son Robbie seems permanently depressed. We learn from flashbacks that Mildred and Angela frequently quarrelled, and there is a strong implication that Mildred's determination to bring the killer to justice is her way of making psychological amends for the fact that she was not close to her daughter during her lifetime, and that she may even have contributed to Angela's death by refusing to lend her the car on the night she was killed.
Willoughby, moreover, is far from being a villain. He is a loving husband and father, and his home life stands in sharp contrast to that of the messed-up Hayes clan. He is conscientious and takes his duties seriously, although the same cannot be said for all the men under his command. One of these, Jason Dixon, is a violent racist who will play an important role in the ensuing drama. Asked why he does not fire Dixon, Willoughby replies that if he had to fire all the racists in his force he would only be left with three men.
The plot of "Three Billboards" deals not only with rape and murder but also with terminal illness, criminal assault, arson and suicide, yet the film is in tone more of an astringent black comedy than the sentimental melodrama which would be the standard Hollywood take on such matters. Of course, there is a fine line between being blackly comic and merely being sick, but McDonagh manages (just) to stay on the right side of it, aided by a superb performance from Frances McDormand as Mildred, a woman whose reaction to her personal tragedy is characterised not only by the expected grief and anger but also by a vicious, cynical wit. McDormand's "Best Actress" Oscar was well deserved.
The "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar went to Sam Rockwell as Dixon, but I personally preferred the contribution of Woody Harrelson as Willoughby, a man who is in many ways the antithesis of Mildred and therefore provides the film with some balance, his love for his family counterbalancing her dysfunctionality and his stoical reaction to his own personal tragedy contrasting with her rage. There were some good supporting performances, although one or two things which never really added up. I could not, for example, understand what the lovely Penelope saw in Charlie. Penelope is not, admittedly, the sharpest knife in the drawer, but beautiful teenagers do not need a lot of academic intelligence to realise that they are beautiful, and that they could do a lot better than an unattractive middle-aged deadbeat whose first marriage failed because he was regularly violent towards his wife.
The final way in which this film departs from the standard Hollywood template is that, for all Mildred's passion, anger and steely determination there is to be no easy resolution. The crime remains unsolved and the criminal unpunished. The ambiguous, uneasy ending, however, is not a weakness but a strength. It reflects one of the film's central themes, that life is not always about happy endings and that there are some injustices which it is beyond human power to rectify, not because someone, somewhere has made a mistake, and not because someone, somewhere is not doing their job properly, but because that is the way of the world. This is something which Willoughby instinctively realises, even if Mildred does not. "Three Billboards in Ebbing, Missouri" is a haunting, unusual film, one (along with the likes of "The Greatest Showman", "Dunkirk" and "Murder on the Orient Express") made in 2017. 8/10