Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is full of fiery anger,
"You know who threw that can?"
"What can?"
"How about you, sweetheart?"
"Um, no, I didn't really --"
satisfying outbursts
"Hey, [bleep]-head!"
"What?"
"Don't say what, Dixon.
When she comes in calling you a [bleep]-head."
and humor that results from rage.
"Ow!"
"You didn't happen to have drilled a little hole in the dentist today, did you?"
"Of course not."
"Huh?"
"I said 'of course not.'"
But Martin McDonagh’s movie actually leaves us with a sneaky message about pulling back
from our rage.
It basically tells us that even though our anger is justified and entirely rational,
what we really need is to give each other more compassion and love.
It’s a beautiful and sweet lesson that’s very needed today.
And the movie pulls it off by being so consistently brutal, weird, hilarious, profound and dark
that no one could ever accuse this film of anything like lazy sentimentality.
"This time, the chick ain't loosing."
Three Billboards looks human nature’s worst characteristics in the face,
and then chooses to kill ‘em with kindness.
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Spoilers ahead from here on out.
The plot is driven by anger.
Frances McDormand’s Mildred Hayes is frustrated that the police investigation is getting nowhere
in finding her daughter’s rapist and murderer after seven months.
"My daughter Angela was murdered seven months ago along this same stretch of road here."
She rents out three billboards to brazenly challenge the police.
We love how Mildred’s energized and empowered by her righteous anger.
"You go girl.
You go [bleep] those cops up."
It moves her to hilariously call people out and say honestly what no one else will.
"This didn't put an end to shit, you [bleep] retard; this is just the [bleep]-ing start.
Why don't you put that on your Good Morning Missouri [bleep]-ing wake up broadcast, bitch?"
It’s a cathartic expression of her grief.
And there’s a social power to this anger.
"Mildred Hayes -- I don't think she's avenging anything.
I think she's seeking justice."
It draws attention back to her daughter’s case.
"I don't think those billboards are very fair."
"The time it took you to get out here whining like a bitch, Willoughby,
some other poor girl's probably out there being butchered right now."
Yet over time.
it starts to become clear that all of this anger isn’t leading to real progress.
"I'll do anything to catch the guy who did it, Ms. Hayes."
Chief of Police Willoughby (played by Woody Harrelson) has been honest about the fact
that they just haven’t caught a break with this case.
"Right now, there ain't too much more we can do."
Willoughby is also dying of cancer and kills himself to spare his family the difficult
final months.
So his act of self-violence, paradoxically, is intended to offer compassion and generosity.
But after this, the not-too-bright police officer Dixon (played by Sam Rockwell) misdirects
his grief
into a terrible outpouring of rage and violence.
We’re forced to watch his horrifying police brutality from Dixon’s perspective as if
we are him,
We’re sickened yet also powerless to stop him.
So this is a turning point in the film, because after Dixon's violence,
we start to question the anger that seemed so invigorating at first in Mildred.
Once Mildred has gone so far as to firebomb the police station without realizing Dixon
is inside it,
and she's been put in her place by James (played by Peter Dinklage) for her bias in dismissing
him due to his size,
"I know I'm a dwarf who sells used cars and has a drinking problem, but who the hell are
you, ma'am?
That billboard lady who never smiles."
we get a slightly scary moment in a restaurant --
Mildred picks up a wine bottle and heads over to the table where her eminently hateable
ex-husband
is sitting with his cartoonishly oblivious young girlfriend.
Mildred’s grip makes us breathe a little faster imagining the clash that's about to
unfold.
But she then just hands them the bottle of wine
and asks them about the words he spoke to her a little earlier,
"All this anger man, it just begets greater anger."
which he said he heard from his girlfriend.
We certainly don’t detest her ex any less than before, but we’re glad she hasn’t
attacked him.
We’ve witnessed enough ferocity and vitriol by this point, and we want a rest.
The real wisdom at the heart of the movie is that we do ultimately have to answer anger
with something else.
We have to answer it with love.
"The most important thing for me was to keep a rein on the comedy and make sure that
the sadness and the loss and the struggle against the hopelessness of the situation
maintained itself all the way through."
One of the key reasons that Mildred starts to subtly soften is the friendship of sorts
that
she’s formed with Willoughby before his death, even though everyone in town thinks
they hate each other and blames Mildred for his suicide.
Willoughby responds to her anger with compassion.
And in a kind of a sick inside joke, he even pays to keep the billboards up for another
month after his death.
So this generous understanding coming from the person she targeted with her rage starts
to transform Mildred.
"I'll do anything to catch your daughter's killer."
Meanwhile, the choice that makes Three Billboards brilliant is giving Dixon a second act.
"Ain't it about time you go home to your mama, Dixon?"
"No, I need time -- I go home to my ma -- mama.
I told her I was gonna be out 'til 12, actually."
After we’ve completely written him off as not just sinfully moronic and racist,
"I thought you only took out black dudes, Dixon?"
but also a true menace to society,
we suddenly get a glimmer of hope for Dixon.
Before his suicide Willoughby writes Dixon a letter that says, deep down,
he believes Dixon has the makings of a good detective.
This statement strikes us as curious at first.
For one thing, Dixon is reading this while not realizing that
he's standing in the blaze of a fire.
So evidently he's no Hercule Poirot.
For another, we’ve recently seen him throw an innocent man out a window due to his misplaced
rage.
In light of what we’ve witnessed, it’s hard to imagine someone more completely unfit
for the job.
"We've had two official complaints about those billboards."
"From who?"
"The lady with a funny eye...and a fat dentist."
"A lady with a funny [bleep]-ing eye?"
But Willoughby believes in Dixon’s potential.
And knowing this inspires Dixon to live up to that faith.
So that seed of trust and love is exactly what Dixon needs to become more than he was.
Dixon escapes the fire making sure to protect Angela Hayes’ case file before his own safety.
He learns the key lesson Willoughby writes to him -- that to be a good detective,
what you really need is to offer love.
Dixon recovers from his burns in a hospital room that he shares with Red, the victim of
his brutality.
And Red shows him forgiveness by offering him a drink of water.
It’s a simple moment but it just might bring tears to many of our eyes.
We thought it wouldn't be possible, but we do come to forgive Dixon, too.
"We assume so much about them and then find out so much more."
He seems to get a stroke of luck when he overhears a confession that sounds like it’s for Angela
Hayes’ murder.
And he takes advantage of this luck.
Yet after this act of love in pursuit of justice, the movie gives us an inconvenient twist --
the suspect may be a rapist, but he isn’t Angela’s rapist.
Mildred is deeply moved by Dixon’s actions -- even though this wasn’t the guy.
Dixon briefly gave her hope, and in working so hard to solve the case,
he showed the care and attention that is what she was really asking for the police
underneath all of her anger.
Three Billboards ends with Dixon and Mildred on a drive to where the rapist lives.
Even though he’s not their guilty man, he deserves punishment.
Still, as they’re driving along, they both admit they’re not sure about this mission.
And they agree to decide what they'll do along the way.
So the movie doesn’t give us a definitive answer as to what Mildred and Dixon are going
to do
when they arrive at this guy's house.
But we get the sense that, given the softening of anger we’ve seen in both,
they don’t really have it in them to go through with this vigilante killing any more.
Even so, the ending is ambiguous for a reason.
We don’t know for sure what they’ll do --
it’s not as if once we discover forgiveness and love, we’ve flipped a switch and choices
get easy.
These duelling impulses are always wrestling inside every person.
Love can heal us, but it’s hard to practice and we don’t always feel we have it in us.
Some griefs never go away, and some crimes should never be forgiven.
"There ain't no God and the whole world's empty and it doesn't matter what we do to
each other?
I hope not."
The message of loving each other works here because the film is still acknowledging that
anger has a purpose and a role to play in driving action or social change.
"We keep the case in the public eye the better your chances are at getting it solved."
Anger is sometimes the only appropriate response to the most egregious wrongs in this world.
These billboards led to this whole journey which helped Mildred finally get beyond
her most raw, open-wound stage of her grief.
They brought her more closure than she was ever going to get without them.
Yet if nothing else, the movie underlines that anger, violence and hate
beget more anger, violence and hate -- until they are met with something else.
And through this tough and timeless lesson, the movie speaks to our world today.
It is so easy to be angry, so justified to be angry, yet more crucial than ever
to look at each other with humanity and compassion.
"What's with the new attitude, Dixon?
Your mama been coaching you?"
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