#Three billboards outside ebbing missouri music movie#
With his suicide letters, all that doubt and wonder that was built up in the first part of the movie vanishes with smoke. Instant redemption is possible the audience handed it over to Willoughby. And that is why the criticism of Dixon’s redemption is, in the long run, a dead-end road to travel down. And then, in the snap of a finger and the blink of an eye, it pulls the rug completely out from under already established assumptions.Īnother way of saying it is this: the film has succeeded in making the audience complicit in everything that will happen from this point forward. And the audience has been sucked into settling in for a movie that isn’t Mildred versus the unknown murderer of her daughter, but Mildred versus Willoughby. Because the Chief hired a deputy who is clearly beyond boundaries of decency fit for service, the film has succeeded in creating enough doubt to wonder about the level of corruption within the force. Except that his suicide includes letters sent behind to a number of people, including Mildred and one realizes that unless the narrative is directed toward making Willoughby one of the most reprehensible villains ever, he actually quite sincerely did all he could to find the killer and that the failure to make any arrest was not an act of corruption and not an act of incompetence, but simply another of the millions of cases each year that go unsolved by police forces around the country.īy this point in the film, the makers have succeeded in getting the audience emotionally invested in Mildred’s outrage. Her response puts their relationship into perspective: “ Well, they wouldn't be as effective after you croak, right?” At that point it would seem that only some kind of natural disaster in the form of the wrath of God could spin this plot away from its set-up of Mildred as the heroine and the Chief as her foil and possibly a villain and even, at its most dramatic extreme, the rapist of her daughter.Īnd then Chief Willoughby commits suicide which for just a moment seems to make the possibility that he is a rapist and murderer all the more likely. That sense of plot development reaches its climax when Mildred tells the Chief that everybody in town knows about his cancer and Willoughby’s response is utter disbelief that she would attempt to humiliate and publicly accused him with the billboards knowing the whole time he was dying. Of the three billboards mentioned on the title, the one which the film most explicitly aims for the audience to read as the most significant is number three: “How come, Chief Willoughby.” The opening section of the film uses this billboard-the only one of the three that gets personal with an accusation by name-to apparently set up a plot where the dramatic tension is situated as a face-off between Willoughby and Mildred. And therein lies the key to how these negative considerations reveal what is actually an underlying brilliance of almost inconceivably sinister subtlety.
As events roll out that incorporate Dixon into the main plot, he seems to undergo a remarkably rapid redemption which critics have labeled “offensive” and prosecuted as detrimental to the character development of Mildred. Dixon spends much of the film as a completely loathsome character energized by hate which is particularly fueled by racism. The most controversial allegation of a failure of logic in the construction of the narrative is centered upon the character of Jason Dixon (despite Sam Rockwell winning an Oscar for his performance). Considering that the film generated mostly positive reviews and that the outlying negative critiques were not directed toward any cinematic aspects (acting, directing, cinematography, etc.) it stands to reason that the “bad” reviews were centered upon storyline flaws. Oddly enough, the true brilliance of this film can be located not in the positive reviews, but in those forwarding certain negative perspectives. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
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