Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Having already chalked up an impressive career as a playwright, Martin McDonagh made his directorial debut in 2006 with Oscar-winning short film ‘Six Shooter’, the promise of which he made good on in memorable style with ‘In Bruges’ in 2009. His sophomore feature film ‘Seven Psychopaths’ opened to mixed reviews in 2013 – admission: never seen it – and, after another four year gap, he returns with ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’.

Now, I fucking bloody loved ‘In Bruges’ (Agitation review here) and consider it a pitch perfect black comedy. But here’s the thing: watch the deleted scenes on the DVD and it comes abundantly clear that had they made the final cut, ‘In Bruges’ wouldn’t have been anywhere near pitch perfect. It would, tonally, have been all over the fucking place.

My guess is that either: (a) McDonagh had an on-the-ball producer on ‘In Bruges’ who knew exactly what did and didn’t work and instructed him to make cuts accordingly, or (b) unanimous test audience responses led to the same outcome.

I can’t claim that ‘Seven Psychopaths’ bolsters or diminishes the observation, not having seen it, but I would hazard a guess that no-one was around on ‘Three Billboards’ to bring to McDonagh’s attention the film’s really jarring tonal shifts. A blander, more boilerplate piece of work might have been sunk by them, but fortunately ‘Three Billboards’ has a hell of a lot to commend it despite its flaws.

Narratively, the first thing it put me in mind of was that Tolstoy novella about the forged promissory note, and how its passage around a provincial town negatively affects everyone involved. Just substitute raped and murdered teenager for forged promissory note and Ebbing, Missouri for provincial Russian town.

The victim of this heinous crime is Angela Hayes (Kathryn Newton). Seven months have passed since the atrocity and the local police department have given up on the case. Angela’s mother Mildred (Frances McDormand) responds by renting three billboards on the backwoods road where Angela was assaulted and killed – she raises the money by selling off a tractor/trailer belonging to her ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), currently shacked up with his 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope (Samara Weaving) – and uses them to unsolved-crime-shame Ebbing sheriff Chief Willoughby (a never-better Woody Harrelson).

To put it mildly, Mildred stirs some shit. Or to put it another way, Mildred tears the bandage off Ebbing’s festering wound. Or to be it another way, if Lisbeth Salander in the novels by Stieg Larsson is the girl who kicked the hornets’ nest, then Mildred is the woman who smacked the hornets’ nest down to the ground, doused it in petrol, tossed a firecracker at it and shouted “yeah, bitch” as it went up in flames.

Mildred’s provocation has its most immediate effect on Willoughby, a man who has admitted that there’s little more he can do as regards Angela’s murder, and is also somewhat distracted by the requirements of setting his affairs in order on account of the fact that he’s dying of cancer. His terminal condition has an understandable knock-on effect on his younger wife Anne (Abbie Cornish: her best turn since ‘Bright Star’) and their two children.

Willoughby’s terminal condition doesn’t do much, either, for the equilibrium of his alcoholic short-fuse deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a man-child in thrall to his obnoxiously racist mother. Unable to vent his frustrations elsewhere, Dixon targets local entrepreneur Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), owner of the advertising company who lease Mildred the billboards. In the broadest of strokes – broad to the point of cliché – McDonagh’s script establishes Dixon as the villain of the piece, as stupid as he is dangerous, only to flip everything on its head.

At any one time, and sometimes with the two or three minute passage of one single scene, ‘Three Billboards’ functions as a black comedy, a procedural, a melodrama, a cautionary tale as regards the exponential consequences of wrong things done for the right reason (airhead Penelope’s “anger begets anger” scene is both laugh-out-loud funny and the intellectual cornerstone of the movie), and an enquiry into the nature of responsibility, forgiveness and atonement.

Atonement is where the film scores its most palpable hits – far more effectively than McDonagh’s brother’s recent outing ‘Calvary’, which attempts a similar enquiry – with scenes between Dixon and Red, and Dixon and Mildred, communicating far more than the understated sketches that McDonagh is wise enough to be satisfied with rather than making some sweeping moral statement.

It’s not exactly front page news to declare than understatement, inference and ambiguity communicate the big themes more effectively than tub-thumping or polemics. But it’s surprising how many artists, of whatever discipline, still haven’t twigged to this. McDonagh fumbles the ball in enough places that an overall less interesting film wouldn’t have survived the uneven tonal shifts, the hackneyed characterisations and the bludgeoningly obvious narrative tropes.

That ‘Three Billboards’ just about dodges its myriad self-fired bullets owes to a first-rate cast who invest in their characters to the hilt, and to McDormand in particular who effortlessly clears the twenty-year hurdle of her achievement in ‘Fargo’ to deliver her definitive performance and bring to life a character for the ages.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Man Who Wasn't There

Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) doesn't have much to say. He's married to Doris (Frances McDormand), a hard-nosed and sharp-tongued would-be social climber who's carrying on with her boss, department store owner Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini) in hopes of fast-tracking her way to a managerial position. Ed works at his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco)'s barber's shop. Michael's the principle barber, the raconteur. The guy who yacks incessantly to the customers. Ed keeps himself to himself. Doesn't say a lot. He just cuts the hair.

One day Ed cuts the hair of entrepeneur Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), who pitches him a business deal. $10,000 and Ed can buy his way into a dry cleaning franchise as a silent partner. Ed sees it as his ticket to a better life. He sends Big Dave a blackmail note, citing knowledge of his affair with Doris and demanding $10K. Big Dave approaches Ed for advice. Ed advises him to pay.
Big Dave coughs up the moolah, but by coincidence sees Tolliver at the drop point. Unbeknowst to Ed, Tolliver had already approached Big Dave as a potential backer, asking for $10K. Big Dave puts two and two together, makes five, goes to see Tolliver, beats the truth out of him and puts two and two together a second time, this time coming up with four. Big Dave approaches Ed again, only it's not advice he wants now. This time he wants Ed's head as a paperweight.

Things take an unexpected turn, however, and Big Dave ends up dead and Ed calmly goes into work the next day like nothing happened. Then a couple of detectives visit him at the barber's shop to inform him Doris has been arrested. The cops have wised up to her affair with Big Dave and - unbeknowst to Ed - the money she's been skimming from the department store - and come up with five. She's charged with murder and arraigned for trial.

Anybody cursing me for not flagging a "spoiler alert" alert right now should take a leaf out of Ed's book: sit down, lit a cigarette, watch the world drift past and ruminate on twists of fate that life conjures up. They should also take comfort from knowing that 'The Man Who Wasn't There' - as serpentine as its plotting is (and it's the equal of 'Miller's Crossing' in this respect) - reaches a point, about halfway through when Big Dave's wife Anne Nirdlinger Brewster (Katherine Horowitz) starts speculating about UFOs and government conspiracies, where plot ceases to matter. Where the whole film reaches a level of visual poetry (frequent Coen collaborator Roger Deakins achieves a pinnacle of the cinematographer's art that can justifiably be called genius). Where the visual poetry is matched by the verbal poetry of Ed's increasingly discursive and existentialist voiceover. For a character who has the absolutely minimum of dialogue, Ed narrates screeds of voiceover.

For the record, the plot as it develops (or devolves, or branches off, depending on personal opinion) encompasses Ed's old friend Walter Abundas (Richard Jenkins) and his pianist daughter Birdie (Scarlett Johannson), and hot-shot lawyer Freddy Riedenschnieder (Tony Shalhoub), a man who builds defences around the uncertainty principle and an almost Ayn Rand-like conception of the modern man. The film's title works on two levels: the disappearence of Tolliver, potentially a crucial witness in Riedenschnieder's defence of Doris; and Ed's estimation of himself.

As the fallout from his blackmail scheme takes ever-more unpredictable turns, bizarro twists of fate complicating matters to the point that when Ed confesses all to Riedenschnieder the lawyer dismisses his entire story because he'd be unable to prove a word of it (!), everyone but Ed seems to pay the price. Like dominos falling, everyone he knows topples; is brought down. Finally, he sees in Birdie's talent for the piano a chance to be a positive influence in someone's life; a chance at redemption. Fate has other ideas in mind.


'The Man Who Wasn't There' is at once the perfect synthesis of everything the Coens had done up to that point, and a stylistic departure. A departure in that (a) it's their first and currently only production in black and white, and (b) their previous films, for all their quirkiness, are still immediate, if not visceral: think of the violence in 'Blood Simple' or 'Miller's Crossing', or the manic protagonists of 'Raising Arizona' and 'The Hudsucker Proxy' and 'O Brother Where Art Thou'. 'The Man Who Wasn't There' has a stillness about it; a detachment. Its aesthetic is reductive, to the point of a harsh clinically white set for the final scene, the sole focal point of which is the electric chair.

And yet it's a distillation of their previous work in terms of cultural touchstones: the convoluted fictions of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett inspired 'The Big Lebowski' and 'Miller's Crossing' and there are hints of both here as well as a dash of Jim Thompson - the blackmail element climaxes quarter of the way into the film, the murder element about halfway, and it's an out-and-out aftermath story thereafter; as well as in terms of visual tropes.

There is probably a scholarly paper somewhere out there entitled "Circular Images in the Films of Joel and Ethan Coen". It's probably as dry as a year-old madeira cake, full of pretentious waffle and will land its desperately earnest author a gig writing for Sight & Sound. I'm almost tempted to write it myself, but I've no truck with the kind of people who endlessly debated the meaning of the hat blowing through the woods in 'Miller's Crossing' (for fuck's sake, Tom says it himself: it was a dream and "it stayed a hat ... I didn't chase it ... nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat") so I'll simply point out the Coens' love for round objects - the tumbleweed and bowling balls in 'Lebowski' and the hula-hoop in 'The Hudsucker Proxy' are here matched by circles of light, a hubcab, the hard white disc of a searchlight and a UFO. The latter is possibly a dream or hallucination. Possibly.

I'm tempted to say 'The Man Who Wasn't There' is the ultimate Coen brothers film, only it doesn't feature John Goodman, John Turturro or George Clooney in the cast. Still, what's inarguable is that 'The Man Who Wasn't There' is achingly beautiful. Beautiful to look at. Beautiful - in Thornton's laconic narration and a soundtrack consisting almost entirely of Beethoven's piano sonatas and the Archduke Trio - to listen to. It did seem, though, for a brief time - with the entertaining but determinedly mainstream 'Intolerable Cruelty' and the just plain average 'The Ladykillers' as follow-ups - that it represented the Coens' peak. Then they made 'No Country for Old Men'. Which goes to show how much I know.