A risque revenge flick
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (R16)
115 mins ★★★★
If you’ve seen the trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking this latest slice of black comedy from In Bruges’ Martin McDonagh is simply a swear-fest featuring Fargo’s magnificent Frances McDormand, and you’d be partly right.
She is magnificent, and there is a lot of cursing. But the absurdly titled, yet accurate, Three Billboards is a dark mix of horrific subject matter – a mother’s laborious mission to have her daughter’s rape and murder solved and punished – and ridiculously enjoyable characters who seem too ludicrous to be real, while at the same time giving the nagging suspicion there might just be folk in Missouri who aren’t that far from the truth…
McDormand is Mildred, the grieving mother, estranged from her ratbag of a husband (a terrific John Hawkes) but tolerated by her dry, laconic teenage son (Manchester by the Sea’s Lucas Hedges). With the investigation into her daughter’s death off the boil, Mildred becomes the bane of the police’s life, her sights set in particular on Woody Harrelson’s Chief Willoughby. Shameless in her attempts to get the police to refocus their efforts, Mildred pits herself against a judgmental town, and a black comedy of pretty egregious errors ensues.
McDonagh’s cast deliver his wicked lines with glee, but the playwrightdirector has developed in his craft since 2008’s breakout crime caper, as now we find our loyalties shift as details are revealed. A marvellously incompetent Sam Rockwell initially disgusts as a bigoted cop, until we find out his overbearing mother gives him a midnight curfew. Harrelson’s smug family life belies a narrative twist and the supporting characters all feel as real as any you’d find in a small town.
The vibrant script and richly drawn characters make this an often intense and constantly compelling caper, with humour nicely pitched to balance McDonagh’s trademark shocks.
Unlike 2012’s Seven Psychopaths (which also starred Rockwell and Harrelson, and was popular with audiences but loathed by this reviewer for its derivative ranting), these characters make meaningful musings and although some of them behave reprehensively, the right people come a cropper.
Moreover, given its underlying premise and Mildred’s narrative thrust, there is an undertone of surprising compassion to the affair.
Three Billboards can be celebrated for putting the 60-year old McDormand centre-stage and letting her tongue rip, and for the slightly risque manner in which it elicits laughs/gasps from viewers. But for the most part it’s just a jolly entertaining romp of a revenge flick. – Sarah Watt