PUT ‘THREE BILLBOARDS’ ON YOUR MOVIEGOING HIGHWAY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand in "Three
Billboards Outside Ebbeing, Missouri"

The stone-faced fury of an anguished mother envelops “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” an offbeat comedy drama that is grim and charming, then grim and charming again --  and then again and again as more characters, conflagrations  and sub-stories are swept into the tale.

The anchor appears to be Mildred  the mother whose ferocity hides self-guilt when she isn’t snapping off profane one-liners or literally taking chunks out of interfering townspeople.  That performance by Frances McDormand has Oscar written all over it because of the intensity and wholeness of how she moves from pent-up anger to sudden outbursts of feeling.  After the film I tried to think of actresses who could have also brought this off – and there are others who could have been cast, but none better and none a more perfect fit.

McDormand, married to Joel Coen of Coen Brothers fame, has long been recognized for her unconventional roles, mold breakers displaying an individuality of operation whose odds with community expectations make us freshly question society’s norms.

This part is even more on the edge of sanity yet McDormand makes Mildred’s rage and sorrow a whole with the rest of us, just braver and more amusing in her expressions. She’s even poignant when talking to her toes.

She also benefits from an ensemble generally so good it disguises how long the arm of coincidence is in the film, which may be one of the points.  Mildred, infuriated at how helpless the police have been in finding who raped and killed her daughter, is operating out of a total belief in her righteousness while coincidences and reversals play havoc with her expectations and ours. The ferocity of her cause sets others on edge. Events disrupt her commitment. Unforeseen consequences create quirky humor.

Woody Harrelson  at the police chief targeted by the billboards provides a life and family force of his own to the events, evoking sympathy and affection even as the message seems to go against him.  As his crazy dumb sidekick Dixon,  Sam Rockwell captures how buffoonery can give way to something more nobly buffoonish. It’s  another performance that will  draw attention at awards time, largely because of how the actor sneaks up on you, forcing a reassessment of what he is. 

Screenwriter and director Martin McDonagh

But McDormand is actually not the film’s main motor. That is the director and writer Martin McDonagh, a noted Irish and British playwright (he has dual citizenship). While he has done well in the first role,  he should be in the running for screenwriting for the  latter. There are great setpieces for the actors, particularly Sandy Martin as Momma Dixon and John Hawkes as Mildred’s ex-husband, not the villain you expect.

On the other hand the talents of Peter Dinklage (best know from “Game of Thrones”) are largely wasted and those of Lucas Hedges as Mildred’s son are strangely abandoned as events unfold.

This is  a darkly comic vision of how attitudes turn in on themselves.  Only quietly is there  a realization how McDonagh’s scene fluidity is holding a bizarre story together into an emotionally satisfying film with a deliberately unclosed ending. 

For all Noth's recent film reviews scroll domsdomain.blogspot.com.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.