I'm sad to say that Three Billboards didn't really resonate with me the way I hoped it would.
Yeah I came away feeling similarly.
There's something to be said about chaos perpetuating itself, but there's too much moral confusion in the film to land on a statement about how to react to that chaos. Maybe it could still be fun without that statement, but it's too serious to rely on fun. Even the spotty humour is too bizzarely timed to save it.
It's a writing issue; surprising coming from McDonagh (quite the playwright). He lends the character turns no context. They exist to serve the idea that chaos begets (*cough*) chaos. There is no reason for the viewer to accept the suicide, Dixon's ill-conceived redemption, or any major dramatic reversal.
These events occur because chaos is bad, or cyclical, or because we shouldn't give in to immense guilt, or something. I think I agree with the film's motives, but not how it gets there. In fact, I don't even think it tries to on the page. It relies on the gravity of the switcheroo to make the point.
It's cute at times and could have made more of itself if it wasn't trying so hard to be weird. No In Bruges.
Trying to figure out why, but there's a disconnect between the dialogue/action and intent of scene that I can't articulate but it's on the tip of my tongue. Out of practice.
A small example is how Dixon hits the girl after he throws Red off the roof. She's the sort of script collateral that bothers me. His redemptive arc - the intent of the scene being "this is an awful act that he will learn from" - features no actual acknowledgment of the people left in his first avatar's wake. It's sparked by a letter
first. (Red is kind to him, but the girl is never brought up again.)
I would say exactly the reverse, its writing like having the main chaarcters self righteousness be partly a cover for her own guilt that makes it a far superior film to typical Hollywood dramas on this kind of subject.
It's a fine sentiment. But the film never does the work to earn the message. It's why, as
@Caveat pointed out, it comes across as morally confused. The priest may have been the wrong messenger; hell, he may have come bearing the wrong message. But her "look over there" argument only means she's an asshole, not that she feels guilty or self-righteous. The film, however, plays her as the victor in that set-piece.
If the audience doesn't palpably perceive the guilt through character work as opposed to a flippant anecdote (the reveal that the daughter wanted to live with dad) or flashback (damn that was weak), they're unlikely to absorb the more sophisticated point: that their redemption/self-righteousness is coming from the wrong place, and that that kind of thing only makes shit worse.
The Coens fuck around with tone a lot - dramatic, campy, ironic - but they would never risk an audience not knowing where a character is coming from.