So I have a difficult time believing any moment in this movie. Seven Psychopaths’ too-cool gangsters don’t have real-world antecedents, so do with them what you will, and the same goes for In Bruges’ gargoyles, but I know Missourians, and they are all much more complicated than anyone in this film, and none of them would ever talk or act like these characters. Three Billboards lacks the remove that makes it easy to accept McDonagh’s caricatures, for me at least. There’s no “small town Missouri” that lives in our collective ether, easy to pluck down and contain a story. Now, granted, Ebbing, Missouri, isn’t a real place, but it isn’t a hyper-real place either. Both locations feel like places (be they fictional or real) McDonagh knows, and while the characters and their actions are broad, they are at least as broad as their settings. Seven Psychopaths locates its characters in Los Angeles ostinsibly, but really they live on the screen in the world of Hollywood’s making acting out archetypes common to post- Pulp Fiction “cool” gangster cinema. McDonagh is Irish, and his first film, the macabre In Bruges sends a pair of Irish gangsters on holiday to a Bosch-ian Belgian town where they look at medieval art and wrestle with guilt. I’ve been trying to figure out why for almost three weeks now.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri fits the paradigm in every case, but still I find myself resisting it. His primary ingredients in his cinematic concoctions have been language, religion, and stories-a few of my favorite things-and he typically casts a few of my actors in his films.
McDonagh’s films are all violent, black comedies deeply concerned about cosmic justice.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the latest film from one of my favorite directors, Martin McDonagh of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths cinematic-fame (though his primary medium is the stage).