Three Billboards Might As Well Be Star Wars With All It’s Controversy

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri has impressed at the awards shows this past year, with Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell taking away Golden Globes for their performances and director Martin McDonagh being nominated along with composer Carter Burwell. It seemed for a while that this film could do no wrong but there has recently been some backlash against the way this film presents some of its characters and themes. In this review I first of all would like to address such controversy and convey my own thoughts on the film afterwards so skip the next paragraph to avoid spoilers about the titular character arc. The main problem people have with the film is Sam Rockwell’s character. Rockwell plays a violent, racist cop, accused of once torturing a black man in police custody. He’s a nasty piece of work. Rockwell’s performance is outstanding, I was blown away by his ability to humanise the character whilst refusing to let us sympathise with him. Too often do we end up with writers and actors trying to make truly awful characters sympathetic or stripping away any humanity in an attempt to avoid this. What bothered people about the character is that it seemed as though McDonagh attempts to give the awful police officer a redemption arc, a culturally tone deaf move in 2017. I see where the anger comes from and if it wasn’t for Rockwell’s performance perhaps I’d feel the same way but I have to disagree with the backlash against this film. When I watched the film I didn’t sympathise with Rockwell’s character and so when he chose to do the right thing I saw it more as an awful person making one good decision rather than him genuinely redeeming himself. If we can’t have bad people do good things in film anymore then we’ll lose a lot of nuance and realism and that would be very unfortunate. Getting stuck in to the actual review, I had very high expectations for this movie, having adored McDonagh’s previous film, the glorious Seven Psychopaths. As I watched this film, in my excitement, I felt as though McDonagh had done it again and blown me away but upon reflection I wouldn’t say my expectations were exceeded, merely met. This doesn’t sound bad, and it isn’t, but the trouble I have with this film is that it was exactly the kind of film I expected from the director, I still loved it but it didn’t surprise me. What I loved about this film was it’s portrayal of its characters, with the combination of great performances and writing for the characters, the film presents the audience with a host of people making terrible yet understandable decisions. I do think the characters carry the film when you look into the other components of the film, the story is rather lacking and, and some of the choices, tonally and pacing wise were rather odd. The themes of this film are a bit muddled in places. It tries to address the problem of racism in the police force whilst being a film with only three black actors in very minor roles, perhaps the message could have been clearer if the lead was a Viola Davis rather than a Frances McDormand? McDonagh also tries to tackle the issue of domestic violence and first of all succeeds in accurately portraying such a relationship but undermines his good work by making a young victim the butt of a lot of the jokes. The film is very tonally inconsistent in that respect, it can’t seem to decide whether it’s a dark comedy or whether we’re supposed to take all of the points presented to us completely seriously. However, I enjoyed the inconsistency in some regards, it reminded me of Fargo in how it made the audience laugh at things that they then felt uncomfortable laughing at. If the tonal inconsistency is something that would bother you though, this film is not for you.

I feel as though I’ve complained about this film more than I wanted to and I’d like to reiterate that I enjoyed it very much, it just has some flaws that prevent it from getting a spotless review and it’s much easier to say what you disliked than what you liked about a film. As for what made me enjoy this film, despite its flaws, a lot of it comes down to the performances. Everyone in this movie, aside from Woody Harrelson who seems a bit bored at certain points in his performance, is on top form for the whole movie and really carry the film through its rough patches. The soundtrack is beautiful, Carter Burwell has really outdone himself on this one, I could listen to that soundtrack all day, in fact I’m doing so as I write this. The cinematography in parts of this film is great too, some really pretty shots, some so good you could just show a still of the scene and you’d get the same feeling as if you were watching the film with the dialogue and music and everything. A lot of this film is truly genius it just has a lot of problems too. On the whole it is a well directed, well acted, mostly well written movie and I would encourage you to go and see it. I’d say it probably has teeth.