It's good but not even the directors best film. I'm not sure why the ratings are so high. I'd give it a solid 7/10

@Invidia said:

Isn't that probably also the reason why her daughter dies in the first place?

Because some other NUT JOB was taking out his frustration upon her daughter when he killed her???

And since he gets away with it, why not take out her frustration on this other guy and use him for a substitute the same way as the KILLER was doing when he abused her daughter?

We have no way of knowing that's true. Dixon figured creepy guy at the very least did something bad to someone which was their rationale for running off to kill him. But, I see your point.

@Invidia said:

Did they ever discuss anything at all about her daughter or her background?

I couldn't care less about her. She's history. The story isn't about her.

Did she know the killer?

It's likely.

After all the mother went through with no one seeming to care very much about the death of her daughter, she probably also assumed that no one would care very much or enough about the Creepy guy either to ever trace his death back to her???

I never got that sentiment at all from them. Also, the guy doesn't live in their town or even in their state.

The movie is about three "individuals" ("3 billboards") all suffering from various levels of "miserabalism." These characters ebb & flow into each others lives, inflating or deflating each other's miserable state. What does one do when you suffer from that condition? Do you allow your miserableness to rub off or directly affect other people? The final words uttered by Mildred reveal this conflicted state of mind -- "we'll see what happens"

Although the ideas explored are universal, the film has particular resonance in the United States, particularly with the apparent white working class "anger" that resulted in Donald Trump being elected President and the White Matters Movement it may have ignited.

I agree with the OP. This movie is full of silly things. But what tipped it into negative territory for me was all the stereotypes. Take out the bad language and the great cinematography and this could have been a telemovie made in the 70s.

The sad thing is that the core premise should have made for an interesting story about small town politics and a woman pushing for justice for her daughter. None of the interesting aspects of that line of thought got a look in. Instead we got hick local law enforcement officers, a totally meaningless side story about the ex and a young girlfriend, a red herring about a suspect, and a basket of other irrelevant and, to me, uninteresting or plain stupid stuff.

If one ever wanted an example of how critics get things wrong en masse, this is a good example.

It's a little heavy-handed at times but, seen as a jet black satire, is one of the most enjoyable films I have seen so far from last year. Superbly acted, with some intelligence behind the writing and often very funny. I liked this a lot.

The function of satire is to bring those in high places or with an inflated sense of themselves down to size. There has been a steady increase in the past couple of decades of making fun of 'small targets'; often people from vulnerable or dispossessed communities. It would be generous to call this satire, and compare it to Swift's spearing of the politically arrogant and stupid, as one earlier commenter did. What this stuff is, is cowardly, sneering and elitist.

In the end it is just a commercialised version of schoolyard bullying. I get it why this is going on. Aspiring satirists take a real risk when they take on hard core issues like race, politics and religion. But to be praising a devolution to this sort of stuff to the point of talking about Oscars and 'masterpiece' makes me despair for the future.

To be clear here, I don't think this qualifies as satire of any sort. Not that I think comedy should have 'no go' topics, but if you want to make comedic material of child abuse and violence against women, then there needs to be a seriously big payoff to that at some point. And this film doesn't even attempt a justification.

I liked it. It was silly at times, but look at the crap that came out in 2017. Anything that seemed different will get awards. /BTW I hated The Shape of Water

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

I agree with the OP. This movie is full of silly things. But what tipped it into negative territory for me was all the stereotypes. Take out the bad language and the great cinematography and this could have been a telemovie made in the 70s.

The sad thing is that the core premise should have made for an interesting story about small town politics and a woman pushing for justice for her daughter. None of the interesting aspects of that line of thought got a look in. Instead we got hick local law enforcement officers, a totally meaningless side story about the ex and a young girlfriend, a red herring about a suspect, and a basket of other irrelevant and, to me, uninteresting or plain stupid stuff.

If one ever wanted an example of how critics get things wrong en masse, this is a good example.

It was a good and interesting film. This is not a film about "small town politics" or a woman pushing for "justice". It is fundamentally about one woman's guilt and frustration in dealing with the murder of her child. And it explores this from a unique perspective. In a more conventional film the plot would be about the police cracking the case, or at the very least Mildred's rage at the police would be justified. But in this film it is established from the get go that her daughter's murder is simply unsolvable and it is unsolvable not because of any ignorance or incompetence on the part of the police but rather simply because no evidence or leads were ever uncovered. It is a novel premise and was well executed.

If I had one gripe it would be that the writing and some of the casting didn't seem to jive with the location. The small town setting was absolutely necessary to make the intimate interactions of the characters believable, but sometimes the writing just didn't fit the locale. He needed to tone it down a bit with the Sorkin style dialogue. And people like Zeljko Ivanek and Samara Weaving just felt out of place. I also wonder why John Hawkes always gets cast in these Southern yokel type roles. He always seems out of place in them to me. He doesn't look like a small town Southern yokel, he doesn't talk like one, and the actor himself is from the Upper Midwest so I just don't get why he keeps getting cast in these type roles. There is a sense that Director just wasn't very familiar with environment where the story takes place and even down to absurdly inflated price for a billboard.

It isn't really an Oscar-worthy film, but this was an exceptionally poor year for films and none of the nominees other than perhaps Lady Bird (which is the sort of film that would be the last nomination in a normal year) is deserving of a Best Picture nominations.

I am aware of what the movie is NOT about. That is part of the disappointment of the film. But it isn't about the 'guilt' of the mother either. I think we are well past the stage where a child/woman is thought responsible for her own rape and murder, let alone her mother being responsible. The film doesn't really deal with what she might have done differently. The film is peculiar in how it does NOT look backward in this context. It has a bonkers narrative that jumps from snickering about little people, to sneering at young women who work in blue collar jobs, to ageist snark about age disparate relationships and on and on. This is why some people are interpreting this as a fucking comedy.

The whole scenario occurs in some kind of vacuum. There are no lawyers or politicians. There is no civil society; no social organisations that exist in any community that might add support. The writers have stripped the stage back to raw individuals: some with power who do not use it properly and some with no power who would use it aggressively. Having dressed the stage in that way, the writers then IGNORE that setting and give us pointless diversions that are neither funny nor dramatically purposeful. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims to greatness requires extraordinary evidence of intelligent film making. While you might have enjoyed this movie, I am not alone in failing to see this as even capable film making, let alone a 'masterpiece'.

The mother's role in her daughter's death is dealt with explicitly during the flashback. The daughter asked to borrow the car. Mildred said no and they got in a fight which led to the daughter walking instead with the daughter quipping "I hope I get raped" as she leaves. Mildred's last words to her daughter were literally "I hope you get raped too." The knife is twisted in further when her ex reveals her daughter had asked to live with him a week before her death and that he regrets saying no because if he hadn't she wouldn't be dead.

"Civil Society" in the form of the Police Department plays a big role in this film. Small towns generally don't have much in the way of "politicians". A part time town council that meets once a month or at most once a week. And the scene where it is revealed that Mildred stopped going to Church explains why she has no social or community support system. They exist, she just turned her back on their help.

The flashback is mere moments. Obviously there are brief references to how the girl came to her end. The point is that these references aren't developed at all. They just sit there, inert.

Police are not part of civil society, which specifically deals with non governmental aspects of social organisation. Church would be one example, but here we do not get church as such, we get one pisspoor trope of a Catholic priest. This is actually an example of how reductive this movie is. The church is reduced to one fat ignorant man. Curiously, the central character is also reduced to a set of friends that is a set of one: an almost literal black sheep.

I get it that there are people who by choice or circumstance are socially isolated. I am saying that the character was written this way. If you elect to give a central character sole agency, or as near to that as is reasonable, then that focuses the audience's attention in a very specific way. I am not expecting this to be a contemporary female Hamlet, but this really is how it is set up. For the story to then totally aver from that psychological dimension and play with rural tropes in such a glib way makes no sense to me at all.

I think this movie, despite some obvious technical sparkle, and the lead makes a decent fist of the material, is, from a storytelling perspective: tone deaf. I think that says something about the unfamiliarity of the writers with the world 'out there'- a conclusion you seem to have arrived at from a different direction. But the end result is the same.

The notion that the Dixon character, a half witted, barely literate loner who lives with his mother, who works a low pay-grade dead end job in a backwoods dying town, is somehow a symbol of privilege of any kind, sums up how tenuous this 'allegory' nonsense really is.

You'd need to bend either reality, or your mind, into a pretzel to see this movie as a viable allegory of the contemporary cultural and political landscape of the US. Frankly, I won't be indulging this conceit any further. It's about as purposeful as arguing about whether clouds are forming teapots or teddybears.

If you want to know how a good movie treats big political themes on a small stage, watch In The Heat Of The Night. If you want to know how a good movie satirises religious and political themes in a comedic way, then Life of Brian. Three Billboards isn't either of these things. It is a hamfisted slam of small town America made by cultural elites. The irony of THAT sort of privilege taking a shot at that sort of dispossession is grotesque.

Anger... How it motivates us, how we deal with and process it and how we react to it is the main theme of the movie...

It's refreshing... It's refreshing to see a whole movie explore this emotion and concept rather than relegate it to just one of the passing stages of grief... Here, it is not explained away trivially...

Nearly all of the characters have to deal with the anger of others, or have anger of their own... It's interesting to see the interplay, the differences and the way some character's attitudes to angry violence is open for change, or not...

Violence, the outward, physical expression of anger is also explored as it is a recurring theme in McDonough's earlier films, In Bruge and Seven Psychopaths...

The cyclical nature of violence and it's unintended and unpridictable consequences are very much front and centre...

It was a good, worthy addition to his other movies... Especially in the context of his commentary on violence in In Bruge and in Seven Psychopaths... This theme is explored here as well, in terms of dealing with anger, or rather not dealing with it... The calming and soothing qualities of love, as an antidote that allows for empathy and clearer judgement...

It reminded me a little bit of A Separation and how that movie dealt with anger and seeking justice, although it was in a less incendiary enviornment...

Solid performances for the most part. McDormand, Rockwell and Harrelson were very good.

However, Dunkirk was a superior movie... More cinematic, yet still dealt with very human emotions and ideas... Albeit in a more detached and less intimate way...

@Invidia I think this is something that doesn't come across as strongly reading about the movie, rather than watching it... It's worth checking out...

I haven't seen it yet... I'll let you know when I have... 👍