The Twit and the Pendulum

Rating: 9/10 (27 November 2017)

Between Bruges and Missouri, if being a writer/director weren't enough, Martin McDonagh could seemingly easily find an alternate calling as an unorthodox travel agent. Of course, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is as much a straight- faced travelogue of the Midwestern United States as McDonagh's In Bruges is a gentle comedy of tourism - namely, not at all. McDonagh's films defy easy categorization with as much flamboyance and vitriolic wit as they subvert narrative expectation, with twists and inversions as wacky as they are devastatingly human. And Three Billboards may be his sharpest, most tenderly sadistic cross-section of human behaviour yet, exemplifying his customary deftness for unpacking the weird, terrible, and unexpectedly graceful decisions people make under intolerably extreme circumstances. Even more impressively: he fans the flames with a seasoning of searing sociopolitical urgency amidst the salty banter and unexpected bursts of extreme violence, before pulling the rug out from under us once again for something altogether more moving and raw.
Taking its place with The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Square as 2017's (unintentional but perfectly pairing) tryptic of sordidly funny meditations on karma and retribution,* Three Billboards adopts an a grandiose, almost Biblical sensibility in its darkly comedic morality play. Characters gradually, painstakingly, learn to try turning the other cheek when running perilously low on vision due to all the 'eye for an eye's, as McDonagh's razor-sharp screenplay adopts a pendulum structure of 'action/reaction/escalation' that becomes increasingly poignant as things careen increasingly out of control. Initially, this ping-ponging of aggression lends the film an affably clumsy, episodic feel, but it's only retroactively clear how carefully-knit McDonagh's writing is, neatly baiting and subverting expectations with coy foreshadowing and red herrings aplenty, with the jaw-dropping spurts of extreme, unexpected violence upstaged only by the seismic power of quiet but instrumental character revelations that McDonagh airdrops in with equally gleeful whimsy.
McDonagh is unmistakably a playwright, and his founding sensibilities root the film in an impressively tense, pressure-cooker claustrophobia. Granted, the snappiness of his viciously eloquent, don't-call-it-Tarantinoesque, dialogue is undercut ever so slightly by the proliferation of transitional establishing shots, buoyed by Carter Burwell's sumptuously sonorous musical score, that privilege elegiac pause over the film's otherwise breakneck, almost screwball comedy pacing. Still, these micro-pauses of deliberation are crucial for not having the audience fanned into a similar fury of indignation as the characters, allowing us a more dispassionate, if not unemotional, take on an increasingly incendiary allegory.
Because here's the rub: amidst all of the bluster, banter, and hyperbolic escalation, Three Billboards is, at its core, a cutting rumination on the current combustible climate of police brutality being taken to task. McDonagh weighs in, appropriately scathingly, on the infuriating, seething impotence in the face of systemic corruption and toxic, discriminatory violence running so deep. At the same time, he vehemently insists on painting every wrinkle of every side with human error shades of grey, and resists the temptation to fully dive down the rabbit hole of larger-than-life fantasy escape into righteously indignant cathartic retribution, a-la Inglourious Basterds, with Frances McDormand's furiously grieving mother its surrogate Aldo Raine. Justice, McDonagh insists, is more than balance, and flecks of unexpected condemnation and redemption colour all sides and individuals, no matter what preconceived roles they slot into. In short, McDonagh's characters are all far too human not to err, but far too human not to understand and forgive in the midst of their doing so. And that, if anything, lends for a well-balanced, contemporary pseudo-Biblical morality parable, even if McDonagh customarily finds his scripture in swearing here.
Frances McDormand is truly extraordinary, imbuing everything from a monologue to a fleeting glance with captivating magnetism and furious emotional weight. Inhabiting a woman carved down by fury and grief into an almost primal human flame of rage, McDormand's flinty composure only occasionally flickers to betray the cavernous guilt and sadness beneath. In spite of this, she's also savagely funny, and her diatribes shutting down a kindly priest and vacuous reporter as accountable for feeding into a broken system couldn't be more a more riotously cathartic mouthpiece for a year full of such infuriating real-life sociopolitical strife. Sam Rockwell similarly delivers some of the most dazzlingly funny and compellingly nuanced of his career, in a performance fuelled by as much misguided rage as by puppy-dog pathos. As Dixon, a small-town Midwestern cop reviled as racist and abusive, Rockwell takes a character we're hardwired to hate and dismiss, and works tirelessly to make us understand and confront the man within the stereotype, while being careful not problematically stray into the territory of misguided folk hero - he's far too brutally honest and sweepingly human for that. Woody Harrelson is equally exceptional, drawing up undercurrents of unexpected elegance and wry humour into a role that equally defies expectation, intriguingly sashaying from antagonist to protagonist scene-by-scene. Lucas Hedges, Abbie Cornish, John Hawks, and Caleb Landry Jones all find their beats of sardonic hilarity and gut-punching humanism with remarkable ease, while Samara Weaving is almost unspeakably funny in her few, fleeting moments, and Peter Dinklage is almost overpoweringly lovable as seemingly the film's only wholly redeemable character.
Just like its titular signage, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri functions as a cultural object dropped in amongst an unsuspecting public, to fan flames, incite conversation and controversy, confront prejudices, and, hopefully, lead to life-changing revelations in perspective. It's an astonishingly intricate and fundamentally human think-piece, and the occasional wobbles in pacing and politics do little to mar its standing as one of the year's most unforgettable films. Still, I'll take Bruges over Missouri - in more ways than one.
-9/10
*There's an amusing poignancy in three of the year's most inevitable Oscar contenders involving extreme karmic consequences for loss. Academy members better bar their second floor windows before considering voting unfavourably for McDonagh's film