Peter Viney's Blog

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Written & Directed by Martin McDonagh

Original music by Carter Burwell

CAST:
Frances McDormand – Mildred Hayes
Woody Harrelson – Chief Willoughby
Sam Rockwell – Dixon
Caleb Landry Jones – Red Welby
Abbie Cornish – Anne Willoughby
Sandy Martin – Momma Dixon
Zeljko Ivanek – Desk Sergeant
Peter Dinklage – James
Lucas Hedges – Robbie Hayes
Clarke Peters – Abercrombie (new police chief)
Kathryn Newton – Angela Hayes
John Hawkes – Charlie Hayes, ex-husband
Samara Weaving – Penelope, Charlie’s 19 year old girlfriend
Darrell Britt-Gibson – Jerome, billboard man
Nick Searcy – Father Montgomery

I noted the care of the title … “outside”is in lower case on the film title, as it should be!

Martin McDonagh made his name as a playwright, and The Lieutenant of Inishmoor is about the funniest black comedy I’ve ever seen … it’s being revived in London later this year. It was part of the Aran Islands trilogy with The Cripple of Inishmaan which we saw starring Daniel Radcliffe in 2013, also brilliant. A few years ago, he decided that film was his chosen form, and wrote and directed In Bruges and 7 Psychopaths. Then to our relief he returned to the stage with Hangmen, widely seen as the Best Play of 2015. He’s back later this year at the new Bridge Theatre with A Very Very Very Dark Matter.

Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand)

So here we are with a film set in Missouri, written and directed by an Irishman, or rather a London-Irishman. Annoyingly the Golden Globes came before its British release … it won Best Motion Picture- Drama, Best screenplay, Best Actress (Drama) for Frances McDormand, Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell. Add nine BAFTA nominations. All these awards are fully deserved. Frances McDormand is so powerful as Mildred Hayes that we identify with her and applaud her throughout, whatever she does. Even if some of what she does is incredibly violent, and she also has an answer for anybody, anytime. This woman is incredibly tough. Somehow she embodies the toughness that the pioneers must have had.

I’d argue with the Golden Globes that Sam Rockwell had a lead main role rather than a supporting role though. Earlier on, you’d say the lead was Woody Harrelson as Police Chief  Willoughby … but no plot spoilers. I note that McDormand, Harrelson and Rockwell share lead billing on the posters, and rightly so.

We saw it on the day of UK release, and noted that Darkest Hour (released the same day) was on two screens in the multiplex, but Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri on just one.

Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell)

Is it a black comedy (McDonagh’s theatrical forte)? There are many times when I laughed out loud. But it’s also poignant, bittersweet and reveals a tremendous imagination in the plotline.  There are moments of high drama, sudden violence, intense excitement. The plot snakes, and twists and turns, and all of my guesses as to direction were wrong … except the final line, which I did predict, though only a minute or two before. McDonagh says the germ of the idea came to him years ago, travelling around the Deep South by bus, when he saw billboards with a similar blazing indictment of the local police. He later wrote the role of Mildred with Frances McDormand in mind:

“I think France’s performance taps into an anger that’s being felt around the world right now. If she’d said “no” we’d have been completely fucked. There’s no one else who can capture a person of that age and class without sentimentalising or patronising them”
Martin McDonagh, Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2018

Briefly, without spoiling the plot …  first a quote from Carter Burwell, who did the music, which is the best very short summary:

When I first read it, it reminded me a bit of Martin’s plays set on the isolated Aran Islands. Everyone in Ebbing knows everyone else, probably too well. Something unimaginably bad has happened and when the town tries to move past it, one woman, Mildred Hayes (Fran McDormand) won’t allow that.

It starts in rural small town Missouri. Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) rents three abandoned billboards from the local advertising agency, run by Red Welby. She wants to point out the ineffectiveness of the police in tracking down the person or persons who raped and murdered her daughter, Angela seven months earlier. She points at Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for apparent inaction, and Willoughby is a sympathetic character in the story … I guess it’s hard for Woody Harrelson not to attract our sympathy, as he is such a nuanced actor. His counter-argument is that it isn’t inaction, but that sometimes you don’t get a lead or clue, and you just don’t find the bad guy.

Police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)

Willoughby presides over a dysfunctional police station, with a tough desk sergeant and the brutal, unhinged and dumb Officer Dixon. There are McDonagh lines I’ll remember as when Dixon is asked “How is the n-gger torturing business going?”; Dixon points out without any irony that now they have to say “person of colour torturing business”. Willoughby has pancreatic cancer. He has a lovely wife and two daughters. Mildred is as tough as old boots throughout in the female performance of the year for me. Her ex-husband Charlie was a police officer and wife beater and looks like a young Jerry Lee Lewis with his teenage girlfriend in tow. Her son doesn’t want to be reminded of any of it. The African American community is represented by Mildred’s shop partner and Jerome, who erects the signs on the billboards.

Willoughby and Mildred

You won’t guess whodunit, though you will find yourself going along a few blind alleys on the way.

The cameos are magic. Dixon’s ultra-belligerent mom snoring on a sofa while a tortoise crawls into her lap; Penelope the beautiful, sweet but thick 19 year old girlfriend of Charlie Hayes; the great (if not in physical height) Peter “Game of Thrones” Dinklage as James, pool player supreme who fancies Mildred; Lucas Hedges (from Manchester By The Sea) as Mildred’s son; Abbie Cornish as Mrs Willoughby; Kathryn Newton as the murdered Angela in a very short flashback quarrel with her mom; Father Montgomery, the parish priest trying to dissuade Mildred  … so many characters who leave a rich impression in spite of limited screen time.

Mildred (Frances McDormand) and James (Peter Dinklage)

The scripted dialogue is, as expected from anyone who has seen McDonagh’s plays, at the very highest level. There’s a touch of the Irish … while youse exists in American English in some Eastern Seaboard areas too, Missouri’s not an area for it.  On linguistic maps, the Ozarks come out as y’all territory. Also the frequency and accurate pointing of C-words ring out as an Irish writer to me. Only a British Isles writer would name the central police officer character, Dixon (see the avuncular Dixon of Dock Green, a total opposite to the character portrayed by Sam Rockwell). A little pointer, or mark of Irishness that I loved, was that Red was reading Flannery O’Connor when Mildred enters his office.

The scenery of hills and lakes is stunning. Apparently “Ebbing, Missouri” is actually Sylva, North Carolina. I hadn’t thought of Missouri as quite that hilly, but it stands in for the Ozarks area of Missouri which definitely is..

Music covers three areas … Irish accented folk (e.g. The Last Rose of Summer),  atmospheric instrumental (think Twin Peaks) and female countryish vocal. In a key bar scene, late on, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down plays right through the scene, the build up and ensuing violence. I thought the Joan Baez version was an odd choice compared to the vastly superior Band original, but then I realized the music focussed on haunting female voices … Levon Helm’s voice on the original would have given the wrong ambience. The song that stood out as different was The Four Tops Walk Away Renee. The song I’m going to have to find is ‘Buckskin Stallion Blues’ which appears early on in the Townes Van Zandt original, then later by Amy Annelle. I have his version. I want hers too.

It is my choice … so far … for Best film for the 2018 Awards season.

*****

MARTIN McDONAGH REVIEWS ON THIS BLOG:

• MARTIN McDONAGH ON THIS BLOG
  The Lieutenant of Inishmore, RSC 2001
  The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grandage Company 2018
  The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013
  Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court, London 2015
  The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, Arena Theatre, 2018
  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (FILM)
  A Very, Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre 2018