Mildred (Frances McDormand) is understandably angry in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Her daughter was raped and murdered; the case has gone cold; and while it’s true that the local police number racists and despicables in their ranks, she seems convinced that they should perform magic without the benefit of DNA evidence or witnesses. Her situation is sympathetic but she is less so in her unsmilingly single-minded, dishonest, even violent crusade for justice. In most movies, the police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), would normally be the smirking face of might-as-well-be Southern law enforcement. However, he attains sympathy, not only because he’s dying of cancer but because he seems fully human, flawed yet doing his job according to his lights.
The movie’s awkward moniker results from the trio of billboards on the outskirts of the fictional town. Mildred rents them and plasters them with calls for justice and denunciations of Willoughby. The townsfolk are united against her, demanding she remove the offensive placards, which only makes her appear admirable as a resolute woman standing up against complacency. But nothing is simple in director Martin McDonagh’s brutal dissection of America’s heartland at its worst. Mildred’s relations with her late daughter had been fraught; she has reason to blame herself for the girl’s fate and wears victimhood like a breastplate and a martyr’s shroud.
The casting for Three Billboards is impeccable, starting with McDormand, whose Mildred is curdled by anger and resentment, and Harrelson as a gruff yet often gentle man confronted by impossible choices. Sam Rockwell plays Dixon, the worst of Willoughby’s officers, as a brutally dumb cracker who undergoes the greatest character development.
“Anger begets greater anger,” says the girlfriend, 19 and none too bright, of Mildred’s ex-husband. She’s parroting something she once read on a bookmark, and her pearl of wisdom can be heard ironically. After all, unfunny as it mostly is, Three Billboards is billed as a dark comedy. And yet, in another twist of the tricky plot, her remark might stand as the moral of a story flecked by moments of hope whose ending has no conclusion.
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