Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars
Bottom Line: Wonderfully acted. Beautifully portrays small town USA life. Jumps the rails. Goes places it shouldn’t have gone. Never comes back.
Watching “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, I was thinking to myself that this is the best movie I have seen in a long time. I loved all the characters. They were real. Their motivations were understandable if not logical. It felt like life in small town USA feels. I felt that way all the way up until a very specific point in the movie, which I won’t mention because spoilers and all that, where suddenly nothing made sense anymore. My suspicion is that, up until that specific point, the movie followed fairly closely to the real events that inspired it and that after that specific point they needed a way to continue the story and give it some sort of ending so they just threw stuff together, but in a way that made it feel like a completely different movie with completely different characters.
More about that specific moment. It is jarring. Having discussed the movie with a few people, they all admit it exists. It is different for everyone, but it is there. This is fascinating to me. Even more fascinating is there is a split on which half of the movie everyone liked more. I really want to take a poll and see if everyone falls into these categories. For me, the last half almost ruined it for me. The characters went from realistic to, well, characters. Their motivations went from grounded in reality to a bit off the wall. It came close to ruining the whole movie for me.
Hands down, I will say that you will love the acting in this movie. Frances McDormand is absolutely wonderful, not that I would expect anything less from her. I have not seen all the Best Actress movies, but she deserved to be there. I am a bit unsure as to why Sam Rockwell was Best Supporting Actor, but that is more because I think he was upstaged by Woody Harrelson than anything else. Though, I do think Rockwell’s character also had the most unlikely of story arcs out of all of them, which did lead to my three stars rating the most.
Nobody I know did not like this movie, including myself. So from that perspective, I guess I would recommend it. I do love how everyone that watches it seems to get something different out of it, whether they thought it was just ok or whether they loved it. It is a wonderful movie to talk about no matter what you think of it and that is not an easy thing to come by.