Disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (10 August 2018)

Sorry. This movie has a lot going for it. Excellent acting, sharp dialogues, great music, and nice visuals. It also has an interesting premise and deals with important social issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. It is thought provoking and moving, which is why I am wasting my time writing this review - because this movie's plot is so poorly constructed that it makes a random episode of "Elementary" look like a piece of high art. I'm going to spoil the hell out of it. Be warned.
First, while I can understand why a mother, mad with grief and blaming herself about the rape and murder of her daughter, would put these billboards up, I can't see the reason she would keep them up. She made the police her enemy. Nobody in Ebbing (this name is really funny in my language, by the way) supported her, except her best friend. Her son was bullied in school because of these billboards. Her son was crying to her that he didn't want them to remind him of his sister's horrifying death every day of his life. Why would she keep wrecking his life, and why would she keep ruining her own life? Plus, sorry, but she was a cashier in a gift shop. This, as far as I'm aware, is not a terribly well paid job. Why would she waste five thousand dollars a month on something that only brings her more grief? She had a living kid to take care of, after all, and one would think that supporting her son would be more important to her than flipping the police off.
Then there are the real problems. OK, I know this movie isn't supposed to be realistic, and I know it is not a detective mystery, but, dammit, the writer/director should have approached the copious amount of criminal activity he showed on screen more carefully. Maybe he wanted to show how corrupt and/or inept the policemen in small Southern cities were. I don't know, and, frankly, I don't care - because there is no way in hell that a police officer, while on duty, will single-handedly destroy an advertising agency, beat the living snot out of its owner, and assault his secretary, and get away with it, especially if he does it in front of dozens of witnesses, one of them - his new chief. At the very least, the people he beat would press charges. There is no way that a woman, grieving or not, will go to a school yard and beat a few kids up and get away with it. There is no way that the same woman will burn the police department down and get away with it, especially after the person who has provided her with an alibi yells in a crowded restaurant that she did it. There is no way that a former police officer will confess (in the same restaurant, in the same freaking scene) that he has committed arson and get away with it. And so on. None of these crimes was properly investigated. None of them led to arresting anyone. (And there were more crimes where the result was the same.) Was that supposed to be a part of the message?
Then there are the absolutely unrealistic situations, like the flashback where the daughter said she hoped she'd get raped and the mother said she had the same hopes. Or the scene where two men entered a bar, sat less than a foot away from a person they didn't know, and started a casual conversation during which one of them bragged about raping a girl to death. Or the scene where two parents left their little girls unattended by a lake and went to the woods to make love and get drunk. Or the scene where the father, after giving his kids one last happy day, went to the stables and shot himself in the head, because he wanted his kids to remember this happy day. And so on. This movie is filled with forced situations that, thanks to the (admittedly, great) acting, somehow work, but at the moment you start thinking about them, you realize that they are forced, unrealistic, and stupid.
All in all, I wanted and expected more. Sorry. (My next review will be more positive, I promise. I need to break this string of negativity.)