Two Oscar contenders you must see

It seems almost certain that Frances McDormand is set for a second Oscar win for her performance in Irish playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It would be a welldeserved accolade for the actress (who won for best actress in Fargo, directed by husband Joel Coen and his brother Ethan Coen) who carries this strange, sometimes uneven but intriguing small-town drama to a level its premise might not warrant.

In the fictional and anachronistically ’50s-styled town of Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes (McDormand, pictured) is a mother seeking vengeance and justice for the rape and death of her daughter.

After months of no answers from the local police department she rents three billboards outside the town, provoking local sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) in a cinematic drive-by flipbook of statements: “RAPED WHILE

DYING,” “AND STILL NO

ARRESTS”, “HOW COME CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?”

Mildred’s challenge throws the quiet town into chaos, forcing everyone to question their attitudes to sexual violence, racial tensions and the lengths to which we as an audience might sympathise with a mother’s relatable but increasingly uncomfortable and violent quest for justice.

McDonagh’s films tend to showcase his background as a playwright — contained settings, drily absurd and slightly unbelievable but entertaining dialogue interactions and a tendency to lose sight of the bigger picture — and this film displays some of those failings.

However, thanks to McDormand’s staunch and gripping performance, a complicated and probable Oscar-winning supporting turn by Sam Rockwell as local racist cop Dixon and a suitably small-town appearance by Harrelson, the film succeeds in overcoming its rather shallow and unfocused approach.

In doing so it provides a darkly comic, ultimately moving and provocative examination of ugly truths in a world that while its under pressure to change, remains all too depressingly familiar.

It may try a little too hard to be more than it is but it’s well-acted and sharptongued entertainment.

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