This one is more like a quirky emotional puzzle put together by a trickster poet. In its vortex of agony and anger, forgiveness and redemption, “Three Billboards” may play, during awards season, as a kindred spirit to “Manchester by the Sea,” yet that movie was a masterpiece of dramatic realism. Lastly, it’s not a tale that offers a pat resolution - though when it’s over, you feel like you’ve been on a journey, and that McDonagh has led us through the paces and pleasures of a three-act story in a stylized, postmodern way. It’s not a whodunit with a clear villain and a connect-the-dots suspense plot that will lead to his capture - though it plays off our desire for all that. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” isn’t a righteous demagogic attack on the complacency of the police, or on masculine violence and privilege - though it is a meditation on those things. But how far can she go? And to what end? Has she gone off her rocker with grief and rage? And where, exactly, is the movie going? She’s woke, she’s fierce, she’s beyond shame or scruples, she’s screaming truth to power, she’s charged up with the wrath of an avenger. A bit later, during an appointment with a dentist who’s friends with Willoughby, she grabs the live drill and plunges it down into his thumbnail, at which point it becomes clear that Mildred isn’t just pressuring the law - she’s vilifying what she views as a patriarchal conspiracy. (It just makes her say, “They won’t be as effective after you croak.”)Ī local priest tries to calm her down, and she responds by likening the church to the Crips and the Bloods (“You’re culpable,” she says). Yet that does nothing to soften Mildred’s fixation on her billboards. When Willoughby shows up to have a talk with her, he sounds, to our surprise, quite sincere in his desire to find the killer - and, what’s more, he reveals that he has cancer.
Mildred, for one, turns out to be even more possessed than we thought.
Yet the black-and-white moral lines quickly bleed into shades of gray.
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