Counterfeit Americana
The most surprising thing about Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is how few genuine surprises there are.
Despite an interesting script that plays constantly with tone, interjecting humor into brutality, and empathy into outrage. Despite a story heavy on the daytime twists (e.g. an abusive cop winding up in the same hospital room as the man he savagely beat). Despite a great cast. Despite a score by Carter Burwell...Something about Three Billboards feels artificial.
Perhaps, it’s the dialogue. Do honkeys way out in rural Missouri really start rattling off Cuba’s human rights record during a barroom pool game? Do functioning alcoholics dressed like Rosie the Riveter typically wax philosophical about gang laws from the 1980s?
Or perhaps it’s the bizarre Australian accent we hear every time the police chief’s wife Ann (Abbie Cornish) opens her mouth?
Or perhaps it’s that the town, supposedly plagued by a racist cop, doesn’t seem to have black people in it, save for two characters in their 20s both far too thin and good looking to be living anywhere near this sad, broken place...
Even Burwell, usually an expert at finding our emotional vein, seems stumped here. His score, far from the sweeping crescendos of Fargo, feels tepid and shy. The only musical cue that even asks for attention is a kind of spaghetti western tune that has had the misfortune of finding itself crossbred with a modernized 4/4 beat.
It’s as if he can’t figure out exactly what Three Billboards is. And we are equally in the dark.
Meanwhile, Frances McDormand, as Mildred, a desperate mother trying to shame the local police into finding her daughter’s killer, walks around like the ugly stick itself, sometimes yelling, sometimes crying. Mildred’s a “strong woman,” sure. But does that automatically make hers a strong performance? In the post-Weinstein world...maybe?
It’s not even that Three Billboards is a bad movie. As long as the characters have something to do – defenestrating each other, killing themselves, drinking – director Martin McDonagh’s work can be downright poetic.
So why does the rest of it feel so forgettable?
We had been glumly figuring on this point for a day or so when finally, it hit us: The Godfather’s great breakthrough was being a movie about the Italian mafia made by Italians. Before that, decades of Hollywood types making gangster flicks had reduced the genre to largely B fare.
Three Billboards is a movie about rural American life made by a British writer/director whose best movie was In Bruges. Martin McDonagh has talent, but his ease with the camera belies a lack of touch with the setting and subject matter.