Cinder-black comedy that defies expectations
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 15 cert, 115 min
★★★★★
Dir Martin Mcdonagh Starring Frances Mcdormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Caleb Landry Jones, Lucas Hedges, Peter Dinklage, Abbie Cornish, Clarke Peters, John Hawkes
This film has a heat that makes you shrink from the cinema screen. After watching Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I had to check my eyebrows were intact. As of this week, with four Golden Globes and eight Bafta nominations, Martin Mcdonagh’s cinder-black revenger’s comedy has nosed its way to the front of the Oscar pack.
Even more so than Mcdonagh’s first film, hitman comedy In Bruges, Three Billboards feels like a kind of highintensity comedic circuit training, and causes strains and burns in ethical muscles you didn’t even realise you had. It is a film that forces you to interrogate your own reactions to it – both in terms of what you’re laughing at and why, and also in the way its characters defy your burnt-in expectations of what they’d do, and what might be done to them in turn.
At first, you think you know where things are going. Frances Mcdormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a mother who wages war on her local police department after their investigation into her daughter’s rape and murder putters to a halt. Riding into town with a twang from Carter Burwell’s spaghetti-western score, she walks into an advertising agency like a gunslinger moseying into a saloon. After some back-and-forth, the firm’s proprietor (Caleb Landry Jones) rents her a trio of hoardings, on to which she pastes a message to the local sheriff, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), designed to shame him into action.
The stage is set for a battle of wills on a Godzilla-versus-king Kong scale, and the film obligingly plays along at first. Mildred is on what she assumes is a straightforward quest: she wants justice and/or revenge – if the two are even different things – and is prepared to burn down the town in pursuit of both. And Willoughby, a family man with an iron will, is a worthy rival. When he and Mildred lock horns it’s like watching two ravenous diners sit down to bloody steak.
You sense the same appetite in the actors too: Mcdormand is on Fargolevel form, making you feel Mildred’s pain in every word and pause, even while delivering the kind of slow-build righteous monologues that make you want to stand up and hoot.
An observation made by Mic Moroney in 1997 about Mcdonagh’s early plays – that they combine “the unravelling murder mysteries of Twin Peaks … with the relentless serial iconoclasm of Father Ted” – holds even more true for this piece, in which Mildred’s single-mindedness keeps snagging on the lives of others, while the conclusion she was aiming for grows ever more mirage-like.