It takes a dying psychopomp in the form of his boss, played with a sly wink by Woody Harrelson, to prompt him on the path of love. A potty-mouthed small town cop, with a racist streak, who privately likes to dance to ABBA, his heart poisoned at birth by the hate he sucked along with his mother’s milk.
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What touched me most in this film by Martin McDonagh, written as if he was shooting a full round of silver bullets into the face of an appalling humanity, was Sam Rockwell‘s performance, the character of Jason Dixon. Because her fury has purpose, like a surgical knife has purpose – to cut and to heal. You just know she will get that justice for her murdered daughter. Nothing so unlikely happened in the town of Twin Peaks.Frances McDormand is an Old Testament act of God in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), all wrath and unrelenting righteousness, avenger of womanhood desecrated, mother archangel of lost causes. Most damagingly, as the credits loom, one key character changes personality in such absurdly dramatic fashion that McDonagh may as well have recast the role. Mildred’s abuse of her former husband’s much younger girlfriend is funny, but nobody much cares – or indeed notices – that, in this corner of nowhere, Chief Willoughby is married to an Australian more than 20 years his junior (Abbie Cornish). For the second time in his cinematic career, he introduces a little person (the indomitable Peter Dinklage) and gives him little to do bar endure endless “midget” gags. When the story begins to stutter, it becomes harder to accept or ignore the author’s more adolescent gags. Then the picture takes a second-act swerve that introduces unhealthy surges of sentimentality and narrative contrivance. McDonagh, whose film career has lurched from the fine In Bruges to the iffy Seven Psychopaths, has set us on the tracks towards a tantalising Grand Guignol soap. But what really sets the performance apart (and could win McDormand the Oscar in a crazily competitive year on the back of a Golden Globe) is her ability to let vulnerability and compassion seep through the cracks. The sequence that sees her kick a female teenager where no female teenager should be kicked has already achieved justified renown. Always a gifted comic, McDormand has great fun with the scene in which – for reasons too complex to explain – she pretends, with one side of her face conspicuously paralysed, not to have just left the dentist. She begins the action as a tough-old-broad and that toughness and that broadness rarely falter. McDormand steps up to the challenge of finding undertones in what could have been a one-note performance. Willoughby is firm and competent, but, when nobody is looking, he proves open to the gentler emotions. Harrelson remains the mayor of Befuddled Masculinity. The chief must, nonetheless, shoulder responsibility for the apparent stasis.
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Mildred’s apparent enemy is the person who understands her best.
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McDonagh has constructed an intriguing narrative knot. When Mildred and he meet to chew over her provocations, he expresses sympathy for her plight and some understanding for her novel response. Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) turns out, however, to be a decent man. Elsewhere in the station, a torpor hangs over day-to-day affairs. Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a mummy-hectored, comic-reading dope, has been implicated in the torture of black suspects. Over the following days, we get some sense of the police department’s inadequacies. In the style of the Burma Shave messages much beloved of Tom Waits, the three billboards read: “Raped while dying”, “And still no arrests?” and “How come, Chief Willoughby?” Torture She establishes that the boards can’t say anything obscene, but they can accuse the local police chief of failing to properly investigate the rape and murder of her daughter. We begin at a lick with the stony-faced Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) stomping into the office of a local advertising firm and negotiating the rental of those billboards. Three Billboards doesn’t exactly fall apart, but too many implausible turns and uncomfortable gags impede the hitherto smooth machinery. There’s a bit of Black Lives Matter in this corner. In a delicious twist, the protagonist and the apparent antagonist prove to be more simpatico than anybody else in their mess-up town. It hangs around a high concept (check the title) that propels all characters into a promising dramatic maelstrom.
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The first third of Martin McDonagh’s latest unromantic comedy is close to perfect.