I had the pleasure of watching this with my dear friend Kerry Kleiman in advance of the Oscars, and we both appreciated it to varying degrees – her, I daresay, more than I. Strong cast, talented writing and direction…but the culmination lacking in the end, perhaps?
THE BLURB:
After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby, the town’s revered chief of police. When his second-in-command, Officer Dixon — an immature mother’s boy with a penchant for violence — gets involved, the battle is only exacerbated.
WHAT WORKED:
I’m a huge fan of three super, SUPER big pieces of this film: Martin MacDonagh, Francis McDormand, and Sam Rockwell. Let’s just get that out of the way first. I can’t recall Francis and Martin working together before, but I *loved* Sam and Martin’s last collaboration, Seven Psychopaths. And make no mistake, Francis is a force of nature in this movie. So is Sam Rockwell, and so is Martin’s script, and the themes that he’s attempting to tackle. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention Woody Harrelson, who actually might be the best performance in the film.
It’s also a GORGEOUS movie. The colors, the settings, the costumes, the town, even the violence is incredibly made and shot.
I also so, SO dig the theme of a woman who has just had enough, and she becomes hard-set and determined to DO something in a helpless situation. It’s a theme I’m sure many, many people can sympathize with, women particularly, and that’s some really powerful stuff.
WHAT DIDN’T:
Of the first point above, and really the other two, as well: THIS TRIO OF TALENT SHOULD HAVE BEEN *BETTER*
It’s not so much that this movie was bad…it’s that it failed to ever bring me in and make me FEEL something. Kerry and I differed on this point, but I really felt like McDormand’s character was tragically under-motivated. I really, really wanted to see a moment that gave me insight into why, after all this time, she decided to take the stand that she did and throw up those billboards, knowing that it would send the town into chaos. I never connected with her character on the emotional level I wanted to.
There’s this scene that they used for the Oscars where she talks to a deer in the field where her billboards are…and it was SO RANDOM AND UNJUSTIFIED. I was actually angry with the movie in the moment, because I knew that this was a moment that should be touching me somewhere in the feels and in the brain…and it wasn’t. They’d fucked it up by not getting me to that point. It was just forced, and laughable instead.
Another super valid criticism is how the film gives Sam Rockwell’s character a super SUPER problematic past, and never deals with it. He tortured a black kid, and it’s brought up, but never, ever addressed. He never has to confront that part of his past, or learn from it. If anything, we see him deflect, deflect, deflect on that, and the only thing he redeems himself on is finally showing a will and an interest by the end of the film in catching whoever killed McDormand’s daughter. That seems pretty troubling in a day and age where law enforcement is having a hard time taking accountability with how they interact with communities of color, and I think the heat the film received because of that is well justified.
In that past, I’ve loved how McDonagh plays with violence in his films. There’s always humor, real, multi-layered characters, and a sense of the brutality of nature/humanity. Those usually come together in a sort of rising violence that reaches a fever pitch by the end of the story, rather like Tarantino, actually…and that doesn’t happen in this movie, really. It’s not huge flaw, there’s nothing to say that MacDonagh needs to stick to a formula by any means, but it was something I noticed and missed.
At the end of the day for me, this film’s biggest crime, however, was that it should have been better than it was. The pieces were there, it just never quite came together. It’s an interesting, still-well-made movie, but it’s no must-watch dramatic filmmaking.
6 out of 10 – go watch Seven Psychopaths instead.