I’m reminded of Tommy Lee Jones (though he’s a decade older), another performer for whom every line or wrinkle suggests a lesson learned for good or ill, a level of gravitas that slowly accumulates in tectonic layers. She is neither vain nor working hard to establish her lack of vanity, and she has a face that has grown ever more interesting with age. It is hard to imagine an actress better suited to the role. This is McDormand’s greatest performance since Fargo, a remarkable portrait of obduracy indifferent to consequences. Moreover, Three Billboards is not merely the story of her interaction with two policemen, but the story of a community struggling to deal with both the horrifying memory of Angela’s murder and the difficult reality of Mildred’s response to it. Mildred Hayes may have the soul of a hitman, but she’s not one: She’s a mother who has lost her only daughter to sexual violence.
And in Seven Psychopaths, a series of violently unhinged men-and one confused screenwriter-trade McDonagh’s particular brand of diamond-sharp verbal barbs.īut choosing to hinge Three Billboards around a female lead tethers the wilder, more boyish fancies to which McDonagh occasionally succumbs. In In Bruges, two hitmen await their fate at the hands of another, more senior killer. In Six Shooter (which, truth be told, did not really merit its Oscar), two men with death in their immediate pasts meet on a train. Until now, the brutal-yet-ironic combatants in his darkly comic theater of cruelty had been almost exclusively male. McDonagh mines his familiar veins here-death, anger, remorse, revenge, ambiguous absolution-but he mines far deeper than in his earlier efforts. (Accused at one point of being in the “nigger-torturing business,” he replies, “It’s the ‘person-of-color’-torturing business.”) This is McDormand’s greatest performance since Fargo. Suffice to say that the story also revolves around Officer Jason Dixon (Rockwell), a low-IQ policemen who lives with his mother and has a record of abusing black suspects in custody. This is a film best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible, and I would caution against reading too much about it, as not all reviews will be so circumspect. That’s all I think I should say about the plot itself. As the local priest explains to her: “Everybody is with you about Angela. But Mildred declines to do so, even as the pressure on her rises in town. He also tells her something else, something he believes will persuade her to take the billboards down-something that would persuade almost any normal, decent person to take the billboards down. “I’d do anything to catch your daughter’s killer,” he tells her. After Mildred puts up her billboards, she receives a visit from Chief Willoughby (Harrelson), who appears to be neither inept nor uncaring. McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, whose daughter Angela’s body was found raped and burned by the side of the road. (More ambitious, too, than his second feature, the wickedly subversive 2012 crime-comedy Seven Psychopaths, of which I was an exceptional admirer.) Three Billboards is substantially more ambitious than either. His debut, Six Shooter, won the 2006 Academy Award for Live-Action Short Film his first feature, In Bruges, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. Though it’s set in a (fictional) town in the Midwest, it exists very much in the moral terrain of Flannery O’Connor’s bleak, existential humor, as is made clear by the fact that we first meet one character while he is reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Even for fans of McDonagh-and I am certainly one- Three Billboards is a revelation, and among the very best films of 2017.Īn Anglo-Irish playwright with multiple Tony Award nominations, McDonagh came to filmmaking relatively late. It contains both the most moving scene I saw in a theater this year and the most mordant bit of black comedy. It is by turns heartbreaking, harrowing in its violence, and very, very funny, and it features Oscar-level performances by Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell.
Rather, it is a film that continually complicates and recomplicates itself, denying viewers the comfort of easy moral footing. And Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is assuredly not that movie. Fordīut Martin McDonagh is not a typical writer-director. André Leon Talley Defined Style on His Own Terms Tanisha C.