Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I find movie awards fascinating. They’re such an interesting horse race of art, commerce, popularity, politics, and zeitgeist. As ostentatious and self-important as they often are, I really do love all the trappings – the nominations, the self-promotion, the ridiculous red carpet pageantry, all of it. While they seem self-congratulatory and unimportant, in Hollywood things like Oscars, Golden Globes, and SAG awards have lots of real world consequences. An Oscar is the difference between being an unknown indie actor getting paid scale to appear in movies no one actually sees and commanding 20 million dollars a picture. Just ask Jennifer Lawrence. 

But it’s important to remember that awards are not the final word in quality or accomplishment. Plenty of worthy films, directors, actors, technicians, and artists go their whole careers without a major award. Hitchcock never won an Oscar.

On the other hand, there are also instances when the award went to the wrong film altogether. I’m not talking about last year’s Oscar mix-up between Moonlight and La La Land. I’m talking about when the wrong film wins. Does anyone actually think How Green Was My Valley is better than Citizen Kane? That Shakespeare in Love was more of an accomplishment than Saving Private Ryan? That Crash deserved anything? Sometimes, winners seem like a good idea but then age badly like 1999’s American Beauty.  Other times, it’s just a head-scratcher all the way around. 

 This is the case for me with the current Oscar front runner for several awards, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Written, produced, and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, the film centers on grieving mother Mildred Hayes, whose teenage daughter’s assault and murder hasn’t been solved in the seven months since her death. Hayes rents three billboards outside of town and accuses the beloved local sheriff of not doing enough in ten foot high letters. Of course, the signs are divisive and make trouble for Mildred, the sheriff, his dimbulb racist deputy, and basically everyone else involved. 

Three Billboards won an armload of big Golden Globes awards and has nine Oscar nominations. The acting awards it has won are understandable more or less. Frances McDormand is excellent in everything she does, and her unrelenting performance as Mildred is intense and unapologetic. Sam Rockwell was fine, I guess, though it’s hard to believe that his was the best supporting performance of the entire year.

No, my problem is that the film won Golden Globes for best screenplay and best picture when it clearly deserves neither. McDonagh’s screenplay reads like a some kind of European Disneyland version of America featuring Hillbillyland or something. It is as though he tried to write about rural middle America without ever having been there and only having read fourth grade level books about it. There is a stageyness to the entire film that never coheres into anything other than an off-putting sense of falseness. It also doesn’t appear to take place in any kind of real world universe I recognize. 

At one point, Sam Rockwell’s deputy character savagely beats a completely innocent citizen and throws him out of a second story window in broad daylight. Nothing happens to him. No charges, no arrest. He gets fired and goes home to read comics at his mom’s house. That’s it.

Also, both his character and McDormand’s Mildred turn on a dime. They are unrelenting in their bitterness or their smallness until suddenly they’re not anymore. And their big epiphanic moments are dumb and clunky. The ending is particularly dissatisfying. A friend suggested it was a European ending because of its ambiguity. I love an ambiguous ending but this conclusion was just unearned, uneven, and lame. Instead of inspiring thought and wonder, I just shook my head. The film wants to be a black comedy that’s also a resounding hymn of redemption, but mostly it’s a pretentious attempt at depth that stumbles along the way. I hope something, anything more worthy wins at the Oscars in March.