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It was hard not to approach Martin McDonagh’s latest picture, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, with high hopes. There is its current status as darling of the awards circuit, of course, having recently picked up a slew of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards – and seven Oscars nods to boot. I was also lucky enough to see McDonagh’s 1996 play The Beauty Queen of Leenane when the 2016 production by theatre group Druid came to Limerick’s Limetree Theatre. It was wickedly funny, perfectly played black comedy and I was riveted. Unfortunately, McDonagh’s latest offering fell victim, perhaps, to my high expectations and I left the cinema feeling somewhat let down.

Three Billboards is not a bad film. We’ll get that out of the way off the bat. It has far too many virtues to deservedly be called ‘bad’. Its premise – a woman puts up billboards calling out the lack of progress in the investigation into her daughter’s rape and murder, putting her on a collision course with her small town’s police force – is original, provocative and brimming with potential. Frances McDormand’s status as frontrunner for Best Actress for her blistering performance as Mildred Hayes, the mother at the centre of the story, is no surprise. Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell are similarly deserving of their own nominations for Best Supporting Actor. In its best moments, McDonagh’s writing is as sharp as ever and the film boasts several top-class scenes. So why did it leave me disappointed?

The problem lies in the way in which these individually excellent elements are pieced together into one whole. This film has features of both a drama and a black comedy – but the way in which these aspects are reconciled is often clunky and unsure. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally incompatible about drama and black comedy, which are often used together to great effect. In fact, they are sometimes used together to great effect in this very film. A scene that springs to mind is one of the many in which Mildred and Chief of Police William Willoughby (Harrelson) are engaged in a razor-sharp back-and-forth, full of classic McDonagh wit – but then there is a sudden, shocking reminder of the fact that Willoughby is a sick man. It is a moment in which McDonagh seems entirely in control of the twin impulses of dark comedy and straight drama which run through his work, with the unexpected intrusion of seriousness serving to encapsulate the character of Mildred Hayes: tough as nails, abrasive and determined, but ultimately good-hearted. Here, tone skilfully serves story.

Unfortunately, it is too often the case in this film that these dramatic and comedic instincts do not work in tandem, but instead pull scenes in opposite directions in a way that is jarring and uncomfortable. For example, in a scene about midways through the film, a scene of domestic violence is interrupted by a young woman who breathlessly acknowledges that her intrusion is ‘inconvenient,’ and at a jibe from Mildred informs her that after losing her job, she is now working at ‘the horse rides for the disableds’. Now, this is a scene that could work if the film was a straight black comedy. But it isn’t – McDonagh seems to want to work genuine, serious pathos into the way Mildred is presented. However, this effort is never entirely successful as he doesn’t seem to be able to restrain his penchant for provocative comedy and give the moments of drama space to breathe, meaning we never really get invested in the way he wants us to. Rather than blending the moments of drama and comedy, they brush up against each other in clumps of dead-straight drama and way too broad comedy, creating moments of serious tonal dissonance in which you feel you are supposed to laugh, but feel too uncomfortable to do so.

There are also problems with the characters and the story. At the forefront of these problems is the character of Jason Dixon (Rockwell), a violent, racist, homophobic police officer whose redemptive arc ultimately emerges to match Mildred’s fight for justice in narrative importance – or at least screen time. It’s a rehabilitation that’s unconvincing, to say the least. Dixon is not a nice person. He is pathetic to the point of being amusing, yes, but he also does some awful things. He’s implied to have tortured black suspects in custody, he bullies and harasses those around him and even beats up another character to the point of hospitalisation. Now, I wouldn’t have trouble buying that despite all this, Dixon is capable of doing good things. Good and bad co-exist in all people and should therefore co-exist in all fictional characters. The problem is the way in which Dixon’s defection to the side of the good guys is portrayed. What prompts Dixon’s turn is, well, hardly anything at all. In a low moment, he is advised that what he needs to do to achieve his dreams is embrace love. Yep. Oh, and there’s a throwaway reference to him being angry since his father died and he had to move home to take care of his mother (who, from what we see of her in the film, doesn’t look like she needs much taking care of). And that’s it! Suddenly Dixon sees the error of his ways. McDonagh, while discussing Dixon in a recent interview with the BBC, claimed that the point of his film is the possibility of change in people. An admirable theme for any piece of art, but not one that is dealt with in any meaningful way here. I hope that racist bullies like Dixon can change. But Dixon’s sudden 180-degree turn into a seeker of justice just doesn’t ring true.

While on the topic of Dixon it seems appropriate to acknowledge the criticisms levelled at this film over its treatment of race. To be honest, as a white European, I am not the person to be making the call on American racial politics and what does and does not cross the line (you could say the same of McDonagh). But for what it’s worth, I did find the film’s treatment of issues pertaining to race to be a bit too flippant for comfort. Dixon’s alleged-but-implied-to-be-actual torturing of black people is used as little more than a lazy, quick way of establishing him as a bad person (but still not bad enough to be disqualified from having a redemption arc). It’s not given the weight it deserves, which is particularly egregious considering the stories about African-Americans and police brutality that have been hitting the headlines for the last few years. This is made even worse by the fact that the three black characters that appear in the film are little more than footnotes – Mildred’s ‘you tell ‘em, girl’ friend from work, a fella that helps out Mildred because he likes that she’s sticking it to the cops (I guess?), and Abercrombie, a black police chief that looks as if he’s been brought in to make a point about Dixon’s racism and then he… doesn’t, really. There’s also McDonagh’s casual slinging around of the n-word. McDonagh applies liberal lashes of all sorts of offensive epithets in the film, actually — black people, gay people, women and little people are all in the firing line. Again, I am not the one to draw the line on the use of many of these words, but I balk at the censorship of art as a general rule so this in and of itself didn’t draw my ire. However, I do believe that in the interests of taste, it should be done with a degree of purpose – to establish character, for example. Unfortunately, McDonagh’s use of slurs can veer towards gratuitous. It occasionally feels as if their inclusion is nothing more than McDonagh making sure you know that this is one edgy, take-no-shit film and if there are any PC-abiding pearl-clutchers in the audience — well, you know where the door is.

Before I conclude this review, I must reiterate that despite its flaws, Three Billboards is not a bad film. I have just spent 1000+ words teasing out my problems with it, but there was plenty about it I enjoyed nonetheless. Its main problem is its lack of coherence. There is something about it that doesn’t feel fully thought out, fully realised. Unlike the fantastic Beauty Queen, which mined a vein of pure black comedy but grasped it and twisted it to find moments of genuine heart and truth, McDonagh does not seem to be exerting the authorial and directorial discipline and control that he should be. There is something faintly indulgent about it, as if rather than singling out a clear vision for it and pursuing this vision throughout the film, McDonagh keeps getting distracted by this character that he really likes, that character that he finds really interesting, this joke that he thinks is really clever – all of which doesn’t inform or shape the main narrative in any meaningful way. He wants to make a tale of taking justice whatever way you can, he wants to make a bombastic black comedy, he wants to make a meditation on the ability of people to change, he wants to make a serious Oscar-bait drama. These impulses are never reconciled and this lack of focus shows up in moments of serious tonal dissonance, in characters whose arcs don’t make emotional sense, in characters and plots that seem pointless. It is a film of outstanding components that ultimately fails to take charge of these components and combine them in the way they should be combined to make something that is not only a good film, but a great piece of art.