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Saturday, March 10, 2018

At the Movies

We're only reviewing one movie this time around, but it's a long review, and you should take the spoiler warning seriously.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

(***spoilers***)

This one presents a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, you have a Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) project with a top-notch cast, and solid performances throughout; on the other hand, the whole thing is wrapped in a tendentious Swiss-cheese plot that gets more annoying the closer you think about it.

By now, even if you haven't seen the movie you probably know the broader strokes -- a mother puts up billboards outside her small town, asking why her daughter's rape/murder from a year ago remains unsolved, and the town (especially the police force) turns against her. Naturally, hijinks ensue.

The first issue is of tone; while initially the movie strikes a few Fargo grace notes, there seems to be an internal struggle over whether this is a mystery, a dramedy, or some other such hybrid cinematic species. Ultimately it decides to be a character study in redemption, particularly the redemption of the incompetent, alcoholic cop, played by Sam Rockwell, who is terrific as always.

The thing about Fargo is that the plot turned on small but realistic moments, seemingly minor missteps and errors of judgment that will certainly be familiar to anyone who's read (for example) Elmore Leonard. If Carl gives Gaear an extra grand or so for the vehicle, he stays out of the, ah, wood chipper, and can go grab the million bucks cash he has stashed in the field. But he gets his back up and picks an unnecessary fight with a weirdo.

Those types of moments in Three Billboards are completely unrealistic when they occur, and are in fact stupid. Many of these dumb moments involve the transformative arc of Rockwell's Jason Dixon character, a comic-book-reading closet-case who drinks and sleeps on the job, enabled by his fellow officers. The department is presided over by Chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, another excellent performance), who has terminal pancreatic cancer, and is portrayed as a wise and fair (if garrulous) old-school lawman who cares about the community and wants to do a good job.

This is where the internal logic of the movie falls apart:  if Willoughby is so wise and fair, why does he permit a worthless lout like Dixon to wear a shield and abuse his authoritah? This is explained away when Willoughby, in one of his many posthumous letters, tells Dixon that he sees a good man and a good cop in him. It's strange, to say the least, that Willoughby literally waits until after he (Willoughby) has killed himself to tell Dixon these things, instead of letting Dixon slosh around town endangering everyone and everything in sight while Willoughby was alive to sit him down and set him straight or fire his dumb ass.

After Willoughby's suicide, Dixon snaps and goes across the street to the office of the company that rents the titular billboards to Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), the grieving mother. Dixon, clearly drunk, breaks the windows, throws the manager out of the second-floor window, and punches the female secretary square in the face. For this Dixon is fired, but bizarrely not arrested.

Most inexplicably -- but again, critical to Dixon's transformation -- after he is fired, he is called and told by an officer (Zeljko Ivanek) to come down to the police station after hours to get the letter that Willoughby wrote for Dixon before killing himself. Because -- get this -- after drunkenly beating the shit out of two civilians in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, and getting fired and turning in his badge and gun, this Mickey Mouse group of Keystone Kops forgot to get Dixon's keys to the fucking police station. I assure you, dear reader, that even in Bumfuck, Misery, when they fire a police officer on the spot for battery and mayhem and destruction of private property, they get the fucking keys to the house back from them before they send them out the door. True story.

But it is essential for his transformative arc that Dixon be in the station house when McDormand decides to firebomb it, thinking it unoccupied. And so he still has the fucking keys.

The final -- perhaps most confounding -- major logical flaw in this plot mess involves the did-he-or-didn't-he element of the unnamed individual (call him Blond Guy) whom we are led to believe may have raped and murdered Hayes' daughter. Blond Guy comes to Mildred's gift shop and intimidates her, strongly insinuating that he was responsible for Angela Hayes' fate.

Later, Blond Guy is drunkenly confessing to a buddy at a bar to having raped and killed someone, while the now-fired Dixon just happens to be overhearing in the next booth. (Even that, lamely, was foreshadowed in Willoughby's letter to Mildred, in a cheap, tired trope.) So Dixon goes outside the bar, memorizes the Idaho license plate on Blond Guy's truck (even though he's drunk off his ass and was a shitty cop in the first place), and comes back in and picks a fight with him, scratching his face so as to get DNA evidence under his fingernails.

Now, here's the stupid part:  after all that, not only does the DNA come back negative, but Ebbing's new police chief says he talked to Blond Guy's commanding officer, who stated that Blond Guy wasn't even in the country when Angela Hayes was raped and murdered. So why does this mysterious out-of-stater trouble himself to intimidate Mildred in the first place, if he had nothing to do with anything? Even red herrings have to make sense, especially when they crop up in the final act.

There are many fine things about this movie. Mildred Hayes is a character to rival Marge Gunderson, and McDormand deserves all the accolades for her portrayal. John Hawkes and Peter Dinklage do yeoman's work with underwritten roles. McDonagh always has a fine eye for exterior location shots. The main themes of redemption and grace, once they show themselves, do carry some weight.

But ultimately, you find yourself quibbling with the major flaws in internal logic, and the unbelievable leaps of credulity needed to position Dixon for those themes. Given the amount of talent in this project, and the ease with which those dumb holes could have been fixed, it makes for a disappointment, to say the least. Not a complete waste, but it's easily the most overrated thing I've seen since Moonlight.

Grade:  D

2 comments:

Unknown said...

watching "ebbing misery",i was aware the pic has more plot holes than the bible, but many of them can be written off as poetic license,which makes for entertainment if not logical consistency. the performances are uniformly excellent, and the motives of the principals are understandable, but i was troubled by the vigilantism which seems to be excused by the characters' back stories. mildred is justifiably distraught, but the sheriff gives good reasons why the investigation has not gotten farther, yet she continues to be grim and mean-spirited (but generally likeable, as only frances mc dormand can pull off). when she starts assaulting her dentist, kicking teenagers in the balls, and throwing molotov cocktails at the police station, she crosses the line. similarly, sam's deputy uses violence to get what he wants--or thinks he wants. in a nation of laws (mostly), taking things into your own hands simply doesn't go. i enjoyed the artistry of the film, and would give it a strong b-plus. there's 'way too much good there to drop it to a d based on shaky plot elements. hobgoblin of little minds is in the house....?

Heywood J. said...

Yeah, I did read some other (professional critic) reviews hitting on the point about vigilantism. Certainly the final scene of McDormand and Rockwell leaving for Idaho, still unsure about whether they'll carry out their "plan," strikes a minor chord there. And the dentist scene was a bit much, played for dark comedy but not quite hitting home. I liked the assaulting teenagers scene a bit more; those little bastards had it coming.

I was originally going to give it a solid gentleman's C, just because of all the positives you mention, but I'm sticking with the D because the plot holes I mention are glaring and would have been easy to fix, and McDonagh couldn't be bothered. I'm sure he'll be heartbroken by my stubbornness.