Movie Review: "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" Isn’t Here to Screw Around

The righteous fury of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri perfectly captures the cultural #mood.

In it, Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, the mother of a teenage girl who was murdered in horrifying fashion one year before the events of the movie.

At breaking point over the radio silence from the police department in her small Missouri town, she pays for three billboards to be erected (I’ll let you guess where) with a message for the local cops. "Raped While Dying," reads the first, followed by, "And Still No Arrests?" The third billboard is aimed at the sheriff, played by Woody Harrelson, "How Come, Chief Willoughby?"

Local sympathies soon turn away from Mildred and towards the chief, who’s reckoning with terminal cancer. But Mildred remains steadfast. How so? Have you ever seen Frances McDormand do her thing on screen before? Double it.

Suddenly, the citizens of Ebbing find themselves locked in a cycle of violent retribution, where police officers and dentists and soldiers and single mothers go to war against one another. In a biting bit of commentary from writer-director Martin McDonagh, despite all the beatings and harassment, only one character winds up behind bars for an extended period of time: a black business-owner, for possession.

It's a comedy. Kinda.

Three Billboards marks the third feature from Oscar-winning short filmmaker and playwright McDonagh, following the masterful, melancholy In Bruges and his screenwriting exercise Seven Psychopaths. His latest, however, more closely follows in the footsteps of his brother John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Calvary and War on Everyone, which were each westerns of varying style and setting. Cinematographer Ben Davis captures vistas from afar as if they were the plains of the Wild West, but he’s not spared from Mildred’s mucky business either; his camera often trains itself on her potential weapons before they’re deployed, or, in one instance, follows another character closely in an impressive unbroken take that demonstrates the depths of their vicious urges.

McDormand is a swaggering lead who leaves everyone else bloodied and burned (I’m referring to the singeing capacity of her performance, but I also mean it literally too). In this #MeToo moment, with her ‘Rosie the Riveter’ jumpsuit, she will come as a heroic relief to most moviegoers.

Will that too-easily paper over the messy moral conundrum of Three Billboards, which isn’t all that concerned with the ‘whodunnit’ aspect of Mildred’s quest, and more closely considers the spiritual wreckage of individual humans in the wake of unimaginable heartbreak? What becomes of a person when they have to carry the burden of tragedy? As we see, some become better people; others become worse. Some bail on existence completely. The rest reserve the right to decide at a later date.

McDonagh’s crafty and perpetually cutting script delivers unexpected fates to its characters, from Mildred and Willoughby to Sam Rockwell’s dunderheaded Officer Dixon and Mildred’s abusive ex-husband, played by John Hawkes. Peter Dinklage, Lucas Hedges, Abbie Cornish, Samara Weaving, Caleb Landry Jones and Clarke Peters fill out the cast, and everyone gets a good line in before the credits roll. Not all shards of dialogue are there for laughs (though many are). McDonagh (like his bro) is expert at needling audiences with politically incorrect barbs, shifting our sympathies in ways that truly challenge. It can sometimes make their films feel overwritten. Yet, McDonagh still ties his disparate threads together, building to an ending that lands surprisingly and satisfyingly.

McDormand’s reunited, partly, with the composer of Fargo’s iconic score, Carter Burwell, and his menacing music here ties Three Billboards to the Coen brothers’ universe of dumb decisions and horrifying ramifications. One person who doesn’t make any mistakes is Martin McDonagh. He makes ‘choices’, and bold ones at that.

4/5

In cinemas 1 January 2018. Rated MA15+ for strong themes and coarse language.