Signs of rage
McDormand plays grieving mother on a mission in ‘Three Billboards’
Aripe, violent and funny/serious slice of Americana with a colorful ensemble, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is expected to give Oscar winner Frances McDormand her fifth Academy Award nomination.
McDormand plays Mildred, an ornery divorcee with a mission, and the spark plug that propels writer-director Martin McDonagh’s multilayered look at a small (if fictional) Missouri town where tragedy, racism, stupidity, revenge and, not least nor last, forgiveness collide.
Mildred is a bitter, determined grieving mother who erects a trio of accusatory billboards against the Ebbing police chief (Woody Harrelson) to demand that he find her 16-yearold daughter’s rapist-killer.
It was years ago that McDonagh (“In Bruges”) saw “something not dissimilar to what the billboards said. It was pretty painful, dark and tragic and I thought not why, but who would put something there that was so painful and raging.
“I didn’t think about it for 20 years, but once I decided it was a woman and a mother, the film almost wrote itself.
“My previous two films were male centered,” he said of “Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths,” “but my plays weren’t. I was determined this film would have a very strong female lead, a mother who was raging but also very strong. Even as I was writing I couldn’t think of anyone but Frances.”
“Martin did write it for me,” McDormand said. “But I turned it down because I was 58 then and I’m 60 now and I like playing my age and being my age. I have a political thing about it.
“I have a working-class background and women from this strata did not wait until they were 38 to have a child. I said, ‘Make me a grandmother,’ and he said no and we went back and forth. Finally my husband (writer-director Joel Coen) said, ‘Shut up and do it.’
“This is not naturalism,” she said. “It’s heightened magical realism. You’re not portraying someone walking through their day; everybody is up a little bit higher.”
Yet “Billboards” remains grounded, she said, in terrible realities. “One of the things I found out talking to people who have lost children,” McDormand said, “if your husband or wife dies, you’re a widow or widower. Your parents die, you’re an orphan. But a child dies? There is no language.” (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” opens Friday.)