Frances McDormand’s grieving mother takes on a town that would rather she stayed quiet

Martin McDonagh wrote and directed Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and he built it around one of the plainest images in recent American film: three disused billboards on a road nobody uses, painted with three sentences nobody wants to read. Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a mother in the fictional town of Ebbing, Missouri, whose teen daughter Angela was raped and murdered. Seven months pass without an arrest. So Mildred rents the boards and buys the fight.

Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.

The Three Signs on the Road Into Ebbing

The billboards read “Raped While Dying,” “And Still No Arrests?,” “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” That last line names Bill Willoughby, the town’s police chief, played by Woody Harrelson. Willoughby is revered in Ebbing. He also has pancreatic cancer, and the whole town knows it even though nobody says it out loud.

That is the trap McDonagh sets in the first act. Mildred is right about the case and wrong about the man, or right about both, or wrong about both. The film refuses to sort it for you. Willoughby visits her to ask her to take the boards down. She says no. He goes back to work on the murder and gets nowhere.

Frances McDormand and the Head of the Police

McDonagh wrote Mildred for McDormand. The actor initially felt she was older than the character as it was written and suggested Mildred be Angela’s grandmother instead of her mother. McDonagh said no, that it would change the story too much. Her husband, Joel Coen, talked her into taking it anyway. She won Best Actress at the 90th Academy Awards.

The performance has a Western spine. McDormand has said John Wayne was an inspiration for playing Mildred as the lead of a modern-style Western. You can see it in how she stands in a doorway, and in how little she gives away when she is losing.

Sam Rockwell Builds Dixon Out of Lee Marvin

Sam Rockwell plays Jason Dixon, Willoughby’s second-in-command. Dixon is an immature mother’s boy with a taste for violence, and the part was written specifically for Rockwell. To play him, Rockwell went looking for the exact opposite of Mildred and landed on Lee Marvin, Wayne’s co-star in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Dixon tries to scare Red Welby, who rented Mildred the billboards, into pulling them down. It does not work. Later, on his mother’s suggestion, Dixon arrests Mildred’s friend Denise on trivial drug possession charges to squeeze Mildred. Amanda Warren plays Denise.

The film gives Dixon more room than most scripts would, and Rockwell won Best Supporting Actor at the 90th Academy Awards for it. Harrelson, Abbie Cornish as Willoughby’s wife Anne, John Hawkes as Mildred’s ex-husband Charlie, and Peter Dinklage as James fill out the town.

A Dentist, a Thumb, and a Face Full of Blood

The middle of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri runs on small ugly scenes that escalate. Mildred’s dentist, Geoffrey, played by Jerry Winsett, sympathizes with Willoughby and menaces her during an appointment. She drills a hole in his thumbnail.

Willoughby brings her in for questioning and coughs blood into her face. He has her released. He is hospitalized, then checks himself out against medical advice. He spends a day with Anne and their two daughters, and then he kills himself.

The film’s cruelty is not decorative. It is the mechanism. Every person in Ebbing is carrying something they cannot put down, and the billboards force all of it into the open at once.

What Mildred Said to Angela

The hardest material sits in memory. Mildred’s relationship with her son Robbie, played by Lucas Hedges, has already frayed under the billboards. Then she recalls her last exchange with Angela. They argued. Mildred lashed back by saying she hopes Angela gets raped.

Charlie, her abusive former police officer ex-husband, confronts her about the signs and lets slip that Angela had asked to come live with him shortly before the murder. He turned her down.

McDonagh does not use these reveals to excuse anyone. He uses them to make the case that grief and guilt are the same weight, and that neither one is a defense.

BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and Seven Oscar Nominations

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was released in the United States in November 2017 and in the United Kingdom in January 2018 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. It grossed $162 million worldwide. It won five BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.

It drew seven nominations at the 90th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won Best Actress for McDormand and Best Supporting Actor for Rockwell. The Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay the 80th-greatest of the 21st century.

Not everyone signed on. Some reviewers criticized how the film handles violence, race, and its social themes. That criticism is worth taking seriously rather than waving off, because the film asks its audience to sit with a lot of ugliness and does not always earn the ease it takes at the end.

Our Verdict on Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Here is what holds up. McDonagh writes dialogue that lands like a thrown punch and never lets a scene run past its point. McDormand, Rockwell, and Harrelson are all doing career-level work in the same movie, which is rarer than awards season makes it sound. The premise is genuinely great, and the film is at its best when it keeps the billboards in view.

Here is what does not. The tonal swerves get reckless in the back half. Dixon’s turn toward something like decency arrives faster than the film has prepared us for, and it asks a lot of the audience on short notice. On race, some reviewers found the film careless, and this paper’s view is that the thread is thin and handled without much interest.

The parts worth ranking, in order of what actually carries the film:

1. McDormand’s Mildred, the engine of every scene she is in.
2. McDonagh’s screenplay, which the Writers Guild put at 80th among the century’s best.
3. Rockwell’s Dixon, a live wire the film cannot quite control.
4. Harrelson’s Willoughby, the moral counterweight who exits too early.
5. The billboards, a device that never wears out.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is not the clean morality play its awards haul suggests. It is messier and meaner, and in this paper’s view better for it in the first hour than the second. Whether it stands as one of 2017’s defining American releases is a judgment the year’s other films will keep contesting.

Frances McDormand · Martin McDonagh · movie review · Oscars 2018 · Sam Rockwell · Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri