‘Three Billboards’ is one to see
For an avatar of our current cultural appetite for accountability, truth-telling and radical moral reckoning, we couldn’t do better than Mildred Hayes, a grieving mother seeking justice and closure in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
Portrayed by Frances McDormand in a performance as ferocious and uncompromising as any of her career, Mildred is an alternately off-putting and deeply sympathetic guide through the world that writer-director Martin McDonagh creates. His movie fuses naturalism and hysterically pitched theatricality with sometimes uneasy, but bracing results.
McDonagh, known for such operatically profane, extravagantly brutal exercises as “In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths,” doesn’t stint on his signature flourishes: “Three Billboards” is as dark as they come, a pitch-black, often laceratingly funny look at human nature at its most nasty, brutish and dimwitted. But he anneals the cleansing fire with moments of startling tenderness, using compassion to shock viewers the way other directors wield the dark arts of sex and violence.
As the movie opens, Mildred has not yet recovered from the sadistic rape and murder of her teenage daughter Angela, a crime that occurred seven months ago in the small Ozark mountain town of Ebbing. Spying three decrepit billboards on her way home one day, she hits on an idea to impel the local police chief, William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), into action: She buys ad space on all three, fashioning a naming-and-shaming campaign asking him why the case is still unsolved.
Mildred’s idea of avenging Angela inevitably has a cascading
effect, not only with Willoughby but also by his dumb-as-a-rock deputy, Dixon, portrayed in an amusingly scurrilous turn by Sam Rockwell.
“Three Billboards” is shot through with stinging, sometimes breathtakingly direct commentaries about racism and policing.
But McDonagh couldn’t have anticipated the moment when his movie would arrive, a time when sexism in its most virulent forms has been revealed in a daily drumbeat of stories recounting exploitation and abuse. In that context, “Three Billboards” is cathartic and occasionally disappointing. Thanks to McDormand’s alert, responsive performance, Mildred’s vigilantism possesses the purifying rage of a million Dirty Harrys rolled into one. Which makes it all the more dubious when McDonagh trots out stereotypically young, pretty, somewhat ditsy girls for comic relief.