Oscars 2018: Three Billboards

"After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command, Officer Dixon -- an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence -- gets involved, the battle is only exacerbated."

Three Billboards is a film that everyone says is great. Critics are calling it ferocious, funny and firey with a riveting central performance by Frances McDormand. Except, it's not really. Only the last part is true. I really wanted to like this film, I love our girl, Frances and was compelled by the badass-mother-who-says-cunt-a-lot-and-goes-around-kicking-everyone-in-the-balls-including-girls-to-exciting-musical-cues premise. But I wanted what I wrote just then to be a joke and for the film to have more substance than that and - yeah, it doesn't really.

Essentially you've got Mildred (FRAN!), an interesting and multi-layered character surrounded by a sea of one-note boring nobodies in a plot where not one realistic thing happens. Literally, it's like if you put Meryl Streep in your illiterate son's play through of the Sims 2. I feel like if you really squinted you could see that all the supporting characters have those glued-together Sim paws for hands like when your computer doesn't have a very good graphics card. Worst offender of all is Woody Harrelson's character, subject of the billboards himself, the impossibly sweet Sheriff-Sim. Woody walks around and grins at everyone because he's swell and the best guy in town. He also has an impossibly gorgeous wife who you'd be mistaken for thinking was his daughter, granddaughter or even great granddaughter but that's OK because she doesn't do much anyway. None of the women do. Oh, apart from one time when she's just being dead silly on the couch after a glass of wine and starts sexily quoting Oscar Wilde because, fuck it, why not. Also what was her accent? Was she Australian? Why would a gorgeous young Australian woman want to move to small town Missouri to marry Woody Harrelson? Oh well, again it's not very important because neither is she.

So yeah, we have Woody-Sim, his lovely wife-Sim and two young daughter-Sims who are probably called Constitution and Capitalism or something (Quick side note - How come in all American films featuring all-American-families they all seem to live in ginormous houses yet still make their all-American children share a room with twin beds? We get it, it's cute but it just seems a bit harsh when you have all that space?). We also have a whole host of fun locals who might as well walk around with their one-word personality descriptions on their shirts. This is particularly jarring with the non-white characters who, in a film which deals with themes of racism and police violence in one of its central characters, literally do little else but smile and wave earnestly at people. Oh and Tyrion from Game of Thrones is in it and everyone calls him a midget and makes fun of him the whole time. That's about it.

I guess I have to talk about Sam Rockwell's character now. YEAH he's a good actor but whatever, I had a big ol prob with this dude. I get it, it's often necessary to deal with themes of racism and homophobia in films in order to show how destructive they are. But I can't think of one time where this arsehole ever really deals with these issues. We get a gleeful amount of 'n-words', 'f-words', 'b-words', basically every shit word people aren't supposed to say anymore, AND a whole extended redemption arc for this guy. We're even meant to sympathise with him by the end of his "journey". Bullshit tbh, this guy tortures a black guy (who we never meet and never get to empathise with), arrests a black woman to 'piss off' Mildred, throws a guy out of a window after repeatedly calling him a fag, punches a woman in the face, etc. etc. it's boring really. He gets a slight comeuppance but it's never directly regarding his behaviour. We genuinely get the "oh but his dad was a dick" excuse as a throwaway line. It's 2018. If you're going to deal with race in America, deal with it properly. Making an anti-hero character a violent biggot doesn't make him "edgy", it makes him a violent biggot. He literally never faces this side of his personality and never learns from this behaviour. It's bullshit and it only really succeeded in shining a light on the writer/director's shortcomings. Oh and the plot makes no sense and no character says a realistic thing in the entire movie. "YEAH BUT IT'S A FILM ITS SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THAT" shut up, Gary or Steve or Dave or whatever you're called. There are loads of good films with ridiculous plots where people do crazy things that make sense with their characters. This isn't one.

So yeah. If you like Frances McDormand, go see this film, she's great. If you like well-written characters and believable plot and character turns, go watch Lady Bird instead (god I hope Lady Bird wins).

WHO THIS FILM IS FOR:

Teenage boys and dumb men.

WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL:

Give Frances McDormand a platform to remind us all how great she is.

WHAT THIS FILM DOESN'T DO DEAD WELL:

Literally everything else.

WHAT THIS FILM IS COMPARABLE TO:

Like if your giant, dumb son tried to write a Coen Brothers film and then fell down the stairs.

WEIRDEST MOMENT:

When Frances McDormand has a conversation with a CGI deer for a bit.

OSCAR POTENCH?:

It's going to fucking win best film isn't it? Just furthering my view that everything is arbitrary and all successful men aren't clever, they're just confident.