Critics reviews

If McDonagh had not let the sin of pride interfere and had, for instance, cut the pious, godlike speech Sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) delivers to the racist Dixon in voiceover from beyond the grave, he would not have come off as so manipulative and clueless. A little humility goes a long way.

The reason to do any barking — well, the reason for me — is that "Three Billboards" feels so off about so many things. It's one of those movies that really do think they're saying something profound about human nature and injustice. It's set in the country's geographical middle, which should trigger a metaphor alert. . . . Individually, not one of these choices qualifies as a disaster. But they're conflated here in a way that achieves a grating otherworldliness.

What places Three Billboards in a higher emotional register than its two predecessors is the tragic poignancy of Angela's death and the sincerity of the sorrow Mildred expresses to Willoughby and Anne. The late rapprochement between Mildred and Dixon . . . begins when he tells her where they can find the rapist drifter who has menaced Mildred and beaten up Dixon. It turns into something much more hopeful when they confess to each other that they're uncertain whether or not they'll kill him.

Despite tossing "Missouri" into its title, Three Billboards demands absolution from any fidelity to actual times or places. The wobbly accents, disjointed spatial relations, vague socioeconomic milieu, and catastrophic ignorance and appropriations of blackness leave no other option. Sadly, the movie feels incoherent even on its own hermetic, rhetorically extravagant terms.

Where McDonagh really struggles, however, is in marrying his typically rich characterizations (of those characters he actually cares about) and morally freighted scenario in a narrative construct that still leaves room for his usual litany of fucks, pisses, and cunts.

Despite the impressive amount of mayhem and gore on view, Three Billboards is an unusually literary film. McDonagh, who began his career as a playwright, and whose previous films include Seven Psychopaths (2012) and the brilliant In Bruges (2008), is intensely concerned with language. In fact, Three Billboards is partly about the power of language—specifically, the outrage and havoc caused by the few words that Mildred chooses to display.

The narrative makes little sense scene by scene, with wild tonal contortions and character 180s, yet this incoherence is the source of the film's intoxicating energy, which is harnessed by Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell in what're among the finest and most daring performances of their respective careers.

McDonagh is here so aggressive in eliciting satisfied hoots and hollers from his audience that his film fumbles even on the level of wish fulfillment. Released in a climate where it's sure to be embraced as "prescient" or "of the moment" (a response that paradoxically undermines the reality that the issues the film pokes at have never not been relevant), Three Billboards is unlikely to be talked about much after awards season mania has died down.

McDonagh finds the best balance of tones he has yet on the big screen—which is not to say that this audacious and sometimes brutal movie hangs together completely. The last half-hour goes a little gonzo for my taste, with coincidences and bodies piling up fast, and there are at least two apparent endings before the real one comes . . . But at its best, Three Billboards has two important things McDonagh's previous films lacked: a lived-in sense of place and a vividly drawn female protagonist.

McDormand's no-vanity performance is fun to watch, and Harrelson is terrific too. He canters through the movie breezily, and it deflates when he exits. But Three Billboards is more arch than it is truly smart. This is life in a small American town as viewed by someone who seems to have spent no more than a few drive-through minutes in one. And even though Three Billboards is intended as a wry cartoon, not a realist tract, it still hangs by a precarious plot thread.

It's more ambitious than Mr. McDonagh's earlier features. Like the older ones, it has loads of gab, plenty of guns and the spectacle of men (mainly) behaving terribly. It also restlessly, if not satisfyingly, shifts between comedy and tragedy — a McDonagh specialty — splattering blood along the way. This time, though, he has also given his movie characters instead of disposable contrivances, a plot instead of self-reflexive ideas about storytelling and a rather diffuse overarching metaphor.

The movie is a game—a cinematic game in which McDonagh feigns empathy with a magician's sleight of hand. His characters' ordeals, demands, sacrifices, and redemptions fit together like, well, a jigsaw puzzle, and he retrofits their traits and experiences to fit. In "Three Billboards," I have the sense that, despite the fulsome emotional displays, McDonagh is far more interested in his narrative contraptions and contrivances than in his characters, who exist solely to play their part in the plot.