Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Review, Cast and Director

Film: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Cast: Frances McDormand; Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Abbie Cornish, Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Dinklage, Lucas Hedges, John Hawkes

Director: Martin McDonagh

Rating: * *  * *

Be careful what you wish for. Equally important, be careful what you say in the heat of anger. Or else, forever lament the awful consequences of thoughtless words, hurtful words uttered. As this multiple-award winning black comedy saturated with the F word, racial slurs and lovely classical and country songs, shows. Rather, warns. “Warns” is an underwhelming description of the actions of the protagonist, a divorcee grieving over the death of her beautiful daughter who is abducted, raped and burnt alive.

Unable to come to terms with the loss and Ebbing, Missouri police force’s inability to solve the crime, she makes a plea for action via three old, almost forgotten billboards. One intense incident after another ratchets up the tension as the mother Mildred Hays (Frances McDormand) drives across town and highways, simmering with anger and plotting, always plotting, how she can get the cops to act. What she does borders on the unlawful. Not that she cares a hoot.

For starters, she tells everybody, her ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), his 19-year-old girlfriend, the parish priest, the cops; what she thinks of them, to their face. A hypocrite Mildred is decidedly not. The parish priest and Holy Mother Church for instance, are accused of being responsible for all paedophilia. Is this true? Of course not. Can a black talk back to a white cop like it happens in this film? Methinks not. He’d have been arrested. Or punched/kicked etc.

Early in the film, the 19-year-old wisely says, “Anger just begets greater anger” and is instantly mocked by Mildred moments before she candidly admits, “I didn’t make that up, I read it somewhere.” Where she read those wise words is laughable – I won’t tell you where, gentle reader, but it’s not the Bible, the original source. But she turns out to be a really nice girl not the slob Mildred makes her out to be.

The target of Mildred’s attacks, Chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) turns out to be a nice guy who believes “Hate never solved anything.” And Mildred is seething with rage and hate as racist cop Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell, terrific) who lives with his mother. No big deal in India, infra dig in Amrika. Dixon is interesting because he is the only one that I can think of (thank goodness for small mercies, someone takes good advice to heart.

In Dixon’s case it comes from sweet William who is afflicted by pancreatic cancer, and writes beautiful, moving prose to various people. Mildred wonders if God exists, if not, “the world’s empty, and it don’t matter what we do to each other.” Which is probably why her vigilantism descending into unlawful behaviour but only think, gentle reader of the Gods who exhort us poor humans to do nasty things. Or so certain humans insist, you know, blaming God for everything.

When Mildred spots a deer at the site of her daughter’s murder, she wonders, like those of us who seek “signs”, if she is being nudged into believing in reincarnation. LOL.OK.OK. I might be RFLOL but writer-director Martin McDonagh’s film resonates with the work of Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, who is actually being read by Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the billboards owner in an early scene before he is despatched to hospital by the psychotic Dixon. Mind you, Welby is white. Everybody hurts or is hurting. Writer-director McDonagh doesn’t cast a halo around bruised or brutal souls.