Jul 28 - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — the ironic tone poem against ritual violence
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is not an ideal movie because the tone challenges genre convention, it follows the arcs of two characters rather than one, and gets kind of allegorical about violence.
But writer-director Martin McDonagh strikes a shaky balance between the small-town familiarity of neighbors lifting each other up in suffering, and a prankster vengeance that escalates to permanent disfigurement. The shaky balance itself, like a fiddler on a roof, is authentic to a small town.
Highly opiniated critics such as Armond White get Three Billboards totally wrong if they dismiss the “archetypes” to “snarky.” (To wit, we do need more movie critics that fit a culture-critic archetype, like Armond White.)
Three Billboards is also a masterful crime story that escalates to implicate everyone and no one. “Raped while dying – And still no arrests? – How come Chief Willoughby?” The open-ended statements on the side of the road are an omen of its complex tone. This investigation in criminal grief keeps us laughing, which is the only satisfaction we will get. In a crime thriller, we want more bloody satisfaction, more justice. In a comedy, we want more escape from anxious conflict, more romance.
McDonough provides neither. But would a grieving mother have this much drive to mess with people? Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning Mildred Hayes shows a range only a few people have, and not many directors dare attempt. Knowing a sliver of what is right and crossing an entire world of boundaries to prove it is standard masculine-hero crap. But the best scenes show her pushing her agenda while the men around her break under the scrutiny and strain. A few times, she suddenly turns into a nurturer. The joke is on the men who cave in and can barely do their job. Her son and ex-husband let her know her anger is totally out of line. Yet, it is her momma-bear archetype that is secretly charged with keeping order in the small towns, anywhere.
In a flashback to that fateful day, the last words exchanged between mother and daughter were a kind of mutual warning of the threshold of adulthood and wilderness: young, rebellious women are destined to be victims of violent strangers. The cold nastiness of Mildred’s grief comes from a deep guilt, because she echoed these reckless threats of exasperated parenting.
In the middle of the story, Mildred’s scapegoat, Sheriff Willoughby (Harrelson), ends his life to shield his family from a slow death to pancreatic cancer. People blame Mildred and her billboards. But Willoughby leaves behind Three Letters of Ebbing, Missouri: for his wife, for Mildred, and for his racist deputy, Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-winning for best supporting).
As the town’s caveman, Dixon looked up to Sheriff Willoughby like a god (despite, nay, because of, Willoughby’s constant scolding.) But his letter intends to inspire conversion to love:
“…And I know you’re going to wince when I say this. But what you need to become a detective, is love. Because through love comes calm. And through calm comes thought. And you need thought to detect stuff sometimes, Jason. It’s kind of all you need. You definitely don’t need a gun. And you definitely don’t need hate. Hate never solved nothin’. But calm did. And thought did. Try it…”
The three billboards asked, “Why, god?” but the god only has fatherly advice for the warring parties.
Dixon’s gumshoe detective effort against a creep that fits the profile is also a self-sacrificial reconciliation with Mildred, but the DNA gives no match. The hope in nailing the guy that did it turns into a vengeance plot shared between them to kill the guy that didn’t do it, because he surely did something, to some girl, somewhere.
This is a stroke of genius in Three Billboards. It is not a breaking of the fourth wall, but the audience’s need for that ritualistic third act of violent justice overcomes the two reconciled detectives – overcomes the logic of detective work itself – and returns them to their heroic fantasies as executioners of justice.
Mildred and Dixon quietly check the titillation of the audience before the road trip of blood: they both say slow goodbyes to their sleeping loved ones, as if they know that crossing this final threshold will not bring a glorious Return of the Hero. But the journey cannot be completed in the time we have, and is thrown back into the audience’s imagination: on the road, they confess their doubts about killing, and decide to figure it out on the way…
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DOOMLEVITY is a blog inspired by mimetic theory.
