Your heart aches for Mildred, but there’s no defending her increasingly erratic behavior. Her strained relationship with Angela, including a calamitous final argument on the night of Angela’s death, has metastasized into something unconscionably foul. Upon closer inspection, however, McDonagh’s delightfully nuanced script reveals the true depth of Mildred’s pain. Mildred’s only purpose in life, it would seem, is to find justice for her daughter. McDormand’s performance is so tightly coiled that you can almost hear the strings groaning under the strain. She hasn’t heard anything about the case from Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) in seven months, which is about six months longer than she finds acceptable. To call Mildred formidable would be an insult to formidability she’s a runaway locomotive of destruction. The threat comes from Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), whose teenage daughter Angela was brutally raped, burned, and murdered. Imagine the turmoil, then, when these billboards are suddenly plastered with a provocative challenge aimed at the local police chief to solve a heinous crime. There are a total of three billboards in town each more dilapidated than the next. It’s the kind of town where shop owners sit around reading Flannery O’Connor (a most worthwhile pastime, indeed) and gossiping about who is sleeping with whom. People are born, they earn a modest living, and then they die. If McDonagh’s dark comedy-drama doesn’t quite out- Fargo Fargo, it brilliantly illustrates the chaos a few choice words can cause in the hands of a talented filmmaker.Įbbing, Missouri isn’t much of a going concern.
McDonagh understands that words can become a prison a conduit for injured souls to spew their venom on enemies both real and imagined. It’s a mistake, however, to assume this power is always skewed toward the positive. Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s latest offering, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is driven by the transformative power of words. In a digital world polluted by snarky hashtags and viral videos, it’s nice to know that the written word can still pack a wallop.
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