His defence is that he’s happy to torture folks of all creeds and colours. In the mix, too, is Willoughby’s mamma’s boy protégé Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who the local constabulary paint as an essentially “good man” despite his predilection for torturing black suspects.
But she’s developed a way of working out how to hit people in the places where it really hurts. She’s still canny enough not to bring a knife to a gunfight, trading body blows – literal and figurative – with anyone prepared to step up. Yet she is no mere emblem, and her reasoning, while often extremely entertaining, often overlooks the deeper nuances of human compassion. Mildred is painted as a female avenger, physically styled after the famous ‘We Can Do It!’ American wartime propaganda poster that was latterly co-opted as an icon of modern, can-do feminism. McDonagh’s writing toys with archetypes but sends everything and everyone in the wrong direction. The early trailers give very little away, hinting at a broad comic tone but delicately swerving the philosophical meat of the matter. What’s great about this film is it’s absolutely nothing like you expect it to be. The police report from seven months back claimed she was “raped while dying”, and such being the case, why hasn’t Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, in “career best” mode) gotten off his rumpled keister to catch the killer? It’s a poser that festers in the minds of the polite townsfolk, but Mildred decides to splay it onto the landscape as both a monument to her fallen kin and a battle cry against those who refuse to dedicate every waking second to the pursuit of justice.
With chunky black type on a blood red background – much like the title cards of some French movie from the 1990s promising hard sexual violence – she poses a question about her dead daughter. Per the title, Mildred decides, on what appears to be a whim, to resurrect three musty advertising billboards sat out in the boonies of the hokey fictional burg of Ebbing, Missouri.
She will drive her family and friends away, all for the cause. She knows that she will no longer be a figure of pity, but of hatred and derision.
She knows that it will unlikely have the desired effect. She knows that people will be offended by her brash actions. In that moment, Mildred makes a decision, and she knows that to carry it out would involve ignoring a set of wider consequences. What does it take to tip a person over the edge to potentially sabotage their own wellbeing for the sake of some destructive greater cause? The film is about a woman who decides to light a rework up the ass of a man she feels has done her wrong, yet in truth, it’s less about retribution and more about why we do it. At this point in her life, God is no friend of Mildred Hayes, but through this moment of sublime clarity, one she experiences while driving her puttering, wood-panelled family saloon down an unused byway, she still believes there might just be somebody up there keeping the lights on.Īs much as it looks like it on the surface, Martin McDonagh’s third feature, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is no simple revenge yarn. The first time we see her face up close, in the midst of a single second she rides the gamut of emotions from workaday desperation, momentary disorientation and, finally, angry gratification.Īnd these emotions aren’t projected through painted, well-worked expressions, but entirely in the eyes and the most minute-but-meaningful lived-in facial contortions. As played by the great Frances McDormand (who is even greater than that informal prefix may have prepared us for), Mildred is a wadded mass of contradictions who is magnetised towards a course of violent direct action. We meet Mildred at a moment of divine inner revelation, when her grief takes on a darker, more corrosively acidic form.