Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) is a movie about encouraging those around you to do better. This atypical story involves the aftermath of a rape and grisly murder of the daughter of Mildred Hayes, a somewhat embittered divorcee who, as she is driving home one day, realizes there are three billboards near the murder scene that are unused. She rents them on a monthly basis and posts a message across them asking the local sheriff why no progress has been made in the last seven months on her daughter’s murder.
As it happens, the sheriff is busy dying of cancer, a fact he thought was private but is, in fact, known to the citizens of Ebbing. This may not bother Mildred, but it bothers her fellow citizens that she would harass the sheriff, and this permits Mildred to explain, in vivid detail, why his condition is irrelevant to his duties, to her friends, enemies, abusive ex-husband, and a priest to whom she makes quite clear has no moral standing if he’s unwilling to root out the abusers in his own colleagues.
Working in the sheriff’s office is a young, directionless man, Dixon, who has absorbed, without noticing, all the hatred around him. He’s not so much bigoted towards minorities as he’s bigoted against anyone who makes his life uncomfortable, not even excepting his mother, with whom he still lives. His lone idol may be the sheriff, so when the sheriff commits suicide, he takes his anger out, not on Mildred, but on the local representative of the company who rented Mildred the billboards, Red Welby. This unfortunate young man is launched from a second floor window to the pavement below, and ends up in the hospital.
Unfortunately for Dixon, the sheriff’s replacement has already arrived and witnessed the incident, and Dixon is immediately fired. He returns home, emotionally lost and out of control. A lifeline appears – a goodbye letter from the sheriff, which he can pick up after the police station closes (he still has a key). The contents of the letter: the sheriff’s belief that Dixon is a good man and has the makings to be a good detective, a sentiment hard for the audience to square.
But while he’s reading the letter, Mildred firebombs the station house, and Dixon escapes the conflagration with burns and Mildred’s daughter’s case file. In the hospital, who’s his roommate?
Oh, you guessed it: Red Welby, the man he tossed out the window. In a touching scene, Welby forgives Dixon.
Dixon is now deeply confused, but, out of the hospital, by chance he happens to overhear a man bragging about a crime that seems to be the same as that which befell Mildred’s daughter. He follows up on it, collecting important information and giving it to the police, but they report the man was out of the country at the time of the crime. Mildred and Dixon, deeply disappointed, decide that justice still needs to be dispensed for this man’s nameless victim, even if they must do so personally.
Or should they? This is where the movie leaves off, with our two main characters questioning if they should take the low road or the high road, and while we cannot be sure, it seems likely that, after the first flush of rage, they will look to the high road, for that’s what both of these people have slowly learned.
To be better.
Full of open-ends, flawed people, and strong performances, this movie deserves every award it won.
Strongly recommended.
