THREE BILLBOARDS IS A RAGE FOR JUSTICE,
Secrets aren’t easy to keep in the titular Ozarks backwater of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” The townsfolk generally know each others’ business, even when it’s none of their business.
Any truths left buried are likely to be pried out by flinty local Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), who swears like a sailor and dresses like an auto mechanic in her blue jumpsuit, but who implausibly runs a gift shop called Southern Charms, selling china rabbits for $7 apiece.
Mildred can tell with one withering glance if you’re telling a lie. She has a way of knowing things about you that you might not even admit to yourself.
So imagine her frustration at not knowing, seven months after the horrifying fact, the identity of the man who raped, murdered and burned her teen daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton), on a lonely stretch of road outside town. And understand why Mildred would spend good money renting a trio of billboards to vent her anger, calling out William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the town’s police chief, for his incompetence or indifference.
Righteous fury, but also dark comedy, roars through this third and best feature by Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”).
Writer/director McDonagh knows how to get good characters into a story but not always how to get them out of it. This time he’s considerably more focused, letting McDormand’s ferocious mother-bear of a performance, her best since “Fargo,” drive the narrative.
This is no small achievement — she’s a lock for Best Actress nominations everywhere — because the story has more twists and turns than the bloodstained highway that runs through it. Our sympathies and scorn seem clear at the outside but they become less so, when difficult facts about the case emerge and parties deserving of disdain approach redemption.
As great as McDormand is, she has at least one other awards-worthy player in her midst: Sam Rockwell. He plays Willoughby’s brutish and racist deputy Dixon, a man-child ripe for comeuppance and education, if the latter is even possible for so dense an individual.
But the most potent “stars” of the movie aren’t even human. Those three billboards of the title — blood red with stark black letters, rising out of the finely realized mist and mood of Ben Davis’ cinematography — stand in a field by the roadside, asking questions and hurling accusations.
They motivate all who see them. They sink into the soul.