Mildred is relentless, and so is the movie. You are ready at any moment for something awful to happen — blood to be spilled, revenge to be enacted, a bad decision about to be carried through to its terrible, inevitable end. And yes, all those things happen in Three Billboards. But precisely because it is such a brooding, suspenseful film, the comic moments come as that much more of a shock.
Many of those laughs come courtesy of McDormand, who’s right at home with the mordant wit so characteristic of McDonagh’s writing (In Bruges, The Beauty Queen of Leenane). Mildred’s big idea is to post a raw challenge on three billboards outside her Missouri town — RAPED WHILE DYING/STILL NO ARRESTS/HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? — making the local police chief her particular target. That the chief is played by Woody Harrelson at his most teddy-bearish, paunch and all, and that the chief also has terminal pancreatic cancer, makes no never-mind to Mildred. When he asks how she could put up such billboards when she knows he’s dying, she responds, “They wouldn’t be so effective after you croak, would they?”
The confluence of comedy and brutality is most pronounced in the character of Willoughby’s second in command, the bumbling, sadistic mama’s boy Officer Jason Dixon. Played just this side of caricature by Sam Rockwell, he’s a dim bulb who’s quick to anger and more incensed than anyone by Mildred’s billboard campaign. She knows just how to get under his skin, too. Knowing he’s been accused in the past of brutal treatment of black suspects, she greets him with “So how's it all going in the nigger-torturing business, Dixon?” To which he replies, with limp bravado, “It's ‘persons of color'-torturing business, these days, if you want to know.’”
But some of Dixon's violent outbursts strain credibility. Though it’s suggested that the townsfolk and Dixon’s fellow police officers tend to give his behavior a pass, he seems to get away with a hell of a lot without retribution from the upstanding police chief, and his mother (Sandy Martin), a a sour-faced harridan reminiscent of the hateful Irish mother in McDonagh's Beauty Queen, eggs him on. He’s deeply attached (and maybe, unconsciously, deeply attracted) to the chief, so that when tragedy strikes Willoughby it’s understandable that Dixon would be more than usually upset. But the reaction of passersby to his appalling, broad-daylight revenge against the young man who sold Mildred the billboards is oddly, unbelievably muted (although the chief’s replacement does finally give Dixon his walking papers).
McDonagh keeps you on edge: There are as many awful outcomes that don’t happen in the film as there are ones that do. Mildred’s relationship with her ex-husband Charlie (a lean, mean John Hawkes) is fraught with echoes of his past abuse of Mildred, aggravated by her profanely dismissive attitude toward his new, much younger, much dumber girlfriend (Samara Weaving). But explosive confrontations devolve into mutual grief — and the sense that what drives Mildred’s crusade is not just anger at the cops but her own feelings of guilt. And later, when Mildred’s out on a quasi-date with “the town midget,” as Charlie refers to the kind-hearted James (Peter Dinklage in a distinct departure from GoT), Mildred’s reaction is not what you expect.
Dixon evolves, too — and if his evolution isn’t entirely believable, maybe that’s the point; McDonagh is keeping us on edge here, too. The maybe-reformed cop may lead the way to finding Angela’s murderer, or he may not. This film is less about whodunnit than it is about what happens afterwards — anger and guilt, yes, but also redemption. It will leave you with questions, with laughs, and most of all with the unforgettable face of Frances McDormand, who’s not merely expressive: She’s a loaded gun ready to fire.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2017.
