Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) dir. by Martin McDonagh

In Missouri, there exists no town by the name of Ebbing, a fact belied by the gritty, at times unflinching realism of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (dir. Martin McDonagh, 2017). Amidst dreams of cowboys and Indians, McDonagh has conjured an anti-mythos of a land and a people brutalized, repeatedly, not by the glossy and nostalgia-commanding hardships of yesteryears but by twenty-first-century scourges: police brutality, racism, and uneven national patterns of industrialization that inevitably leave places like Ebbing behind. Viewers get the sense from the film's opening sequence that Ebbing—at once self-contained (not a single Starbucks dots Main Street) and devastatingly reflective of these global truths—reverberates with the unmistakable anxiety of a place deeply unsure of itself. Minutes after the film commences with a series of shots of decrepit, dirty road-side billboards, the local advertising agency boy, Red (Caleb Landry Jones), snarkily concedes that not many frequent those parts anymore, at least not "since the freeway got put in." Although viewers never see this aforementioned freeway, it looms off-screen as an emblem of the irrevocable instability of a town caught between what was and what is, between community and individual, between the promised order of Western civilization and the threat of chaos that underlies all manmade entities, including notions of justice.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri follows mother Mildred Hayes' (Frances McDormand) increasingly controversial and at times violent efforts to track down her daughter Angela's (Kathryn Newton) rapist and murderer after the local police department fails to turn up any leads in a span of seven months. In so doing, the film portrays Ebbing and its inhabitants as perhaps senselessly wedded to the idea of control in an uncontrollable world; in the age of sniffer dogs and big data, Angela's remains provide nothing of use to law enforcement. Without any eyewitnesses, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) remains frustratedly in the dark as an anguished Mildred sponsors billboards in protest, drills a hole in the thumb of the town dentist, sets fire to the police station, and (potentially) commits murder just after the film's end. Intriguingly, Mildred's version of asserting order, albeit usually in vain, assumes essential incompetence at the institutional level and relies upon extralegal brute force. The mother's iteration of justice might read as primitive, but Ebbing is presented as a disorderly place in which one lacks options—it is a land between the twin coasts of progress and reason that attracts ghosts rather than financiers, a space where bandits and plunderers might do their damage and escape unscathed into the dusty horizon. Chief Willoughby, a superficially plausible option to represent the faith in the collective that Mildred sorely lacks, sides unmistakably with her on at least one front. Dying of pancreatic cancer, Willoughby leaves the hospital against doctor's orders, and less than halfway through the film, he commits suicide so as to establish some degree of bodily autonomy in the face of a rapid and inevitable physical decline.

When the holy trinity of institutions—the church, the state, and marriage—proves incapable of delivering more palatable versions of redemption, the film suggests that justice must instead be seized forcefully. During a dinner-date scene, Mildred encounters her ex-husband out with his (much younger) girlfriend, a down-on-her-luck former zookeeper who chummily insists on the adage, "anger begets greater anger." Maybe so, but Ebbing hosts a cast of characters with little else but anger at their immediate disposal. While looking on in disgust, then, viewers might refrain from blaming such characters for their behavior. As Mildred burns down the police station, slow-moving imagery and the words of a now-dead Willoughby ("Hate never solved nothing. But calm did. And thought did") contrast uneasily with an awesome display of uninhibited wrath, of a primal need to act rather than be acted upon, to assert something, anything in a place where one's assertions fall dumb in the face of cosmic, uncontrollable forces. In the end, Ebbing presents as a place just out of reach of the...