This mother is superior
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
Fran-tastic. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (profanity, violence). Now playing.
THIS rural drama is the best yet from playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”), and one of Frances McDormand’s greatest performances. As the tough-as-nails Mildred Hayes, whose teen daughter has been brutally raped and murdered, she embarks on a mission to shake the town’s police force out of its complacency and make it address the unsolved monthsold crime. Her solution? It’s all in the title.
As usual, McDonagh’s screenplay is bleakly comic, with sparky and complex exchanges among its small-town characters, who alternately clash and support one another in the way of any dysfunctional family.
Woody Harrelson is the town’s beloved chief of police, Willoughby, who pushes back against Mildred’s ad campaign — which calls him out by name — but privately agonizes over not having solved the crime. Sam Rockwell goes magnificently dead in the eyes as a dimwitted drunk of a cop. Caleb Landry Jones (who made such a terrifying preppie in “Get Out”) is Red, the town clerk who rents Mildred the billboard space and suffers the town’s backlash.
Lucas Hedges, Abbie Cornish, Zeljko Ivanek and John Hawkes are all here as well, and Nick Searcy (“11.22.63”) plays Father Montgomery, the town priest who receives a truly magnificent dressing-down in one of Mildred’s curse-studded monologues. McDonagh’s got a knack for diving down into the casually cruel vernacular of a small town. Still, his throwing around the word “retarded” can be jarring, not to mention a cheap-shot running joke about Peter Dinklage’s character: “I think that midget wants to get in my pants,” Mildred laughs. His car-salesman character, James, finally gets a chance to verbally hit back, and ends up merely giving a speech about how he knows he’s not such a good catch — what with his being a midget and all.
But McDormand’s blazing turn as Mildred is more than enough reason to seek out this otherwise masterfully dark, morbidly funny film — and, I imagine, for award nominations to start heading her way soon.