īut McDonagh couldn’t have anticipated the moment when his movie would arrive, a time when sexism in its most virulent forms has been revealed in a daily drumbeat of stories recounting unspeakable exploitation and abuse.įrances McDormand plays an angry, grieving mother in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” (Photo by Merrick Morton/Fox Searchlight Pictures) )
“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is shot through with stinging, sometimes breathtakingly direct commentaries about racism and policing in a community that even though it’s fictional, lies firmly within the orbit of Ferguson. Casting vanity to the wind, Rockwell affects an ungainly posture and unflattering haircut to play a racist, homophobic, supremely idiotic mama’s-boy drunk on his own blunt-force power: If Mildred embodies fairness at its most extreme, Dixon is its opposite, a living, breathing symbol of unacknowledged, unearned privilege. Mildred’s idea of avenging Angela inevitably has a cascading effect, not only with Willoughby - played with upstanding directness and pathos by Harrelson - but also by his dumb-as-a-rock deputy, Dixon, portrayed in an amusingly scurrilous turn by Sam Rockwell.
Spying three decrepit billboards on her way home one day, she hits on an idea to impel the local police chief, William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), into action: She buys ad space on all three, fashioning a naming-and-shaming campaign asking him why the case is still unsolved. But he anneals the cleansing fire with moments of startling tenderness, using compassion to shock viewers the way other directors wield the dark arts of sex and violence.Īs the movie opens, Mildred has not yet recovered from the sadistic rape and murder of her teenage daughter Angela, a crime that occurred seven months ago in the small Ozark mountain town of Ebbing. McDonagh, known for such operatically profane, extravagantly brutal exercises as " In Bruges" and " Seven Psychopaths," doesn't stint on his signature flourishes: "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" is as dark as they come, a pitch-black, often laceratingly funny look at human nature at its most nasty, brutish and dimwitted. His movie fuses naturalism and hysterically pitched theatricality with sometimes uneasy, but bracing results. Portrayed by Frances McDormand in a performance as ferocious and uncompromising as any of her career, Mildred turns out to be an alternately off-putting and deeply sympathetic guide through the world that writer-director Martin McDonagh creates. When the police fail to act, she rents three billboards to air her grievances.įor an avatar of our current cultural appetite for accountability, truth-telling and radical moral reckoning, we couldn’t possibly do better than Mildred Hayes, a grieving mother seeking justice and closure in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Mildred (Frances McDormand) is a single mother grieving and feeling immense guilt over the rape and violent murder of her teenage daughter.