![]() Her Mildred takes no prisoners, but also feels like someone literally torn apart inside by grief. She is simply stunning when it comes to internal language, so often revealing the pain underneath the rage. Harrelson is great too, but the film belongs to McDormand, who can do more with a withering glare than most actresses can do with a monologue. Rockwell has a big arc in this film and he takes no false steps, as usual. He looks older and pudgier, like he drinks himself to sleep every night and doesn’t really trust that life has much in store for him. Rockwell often plays nice guys, but he’s more effective here as a racist, violent cop than you might expect. Dixon has less of an idea of what to do with his, but one senses early on that it’s probably going to eventually cost him his job. Mildred is channeling her anger to solve her daughter’s murder. Life has screwed over both of these people, and it has made them both angry. McDonagh spares no one, allowing almost all of his characters to be deeply flawed, especially McDormand’s Mildred and Rockwell’s Dixon. Mildred rents the billboards, which leads to pressure on the chief, which leads to anger from his loyal officer, and so on and so on down the line. On one level, it is more about cause and effect than crime and resolution. The mystery of what happened to Angela would have dominated other versions of this story, but this is not really that movie. You might think you have your finger on what this will be like from that description, but McDonagh’s simply perfect script is never quite what you expect it to be. Peter Dinklage, Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges, Clarke Peters, and John Hawkes fill out a ridiculously perfect supporting cast. Local media becomes interested in the billboards, and the attention sparks a series of events involving not only the chief but one of his more loathsome officers, played by Sam Rockwell. One day, she sees three barren billboards on a rarely-traveled road, and she rents the space to ask the local chief of police, played by Woody Harrelson, why there are no answers. There was no matching DNA, so the spotlight has dimmed and Mildred is getting no updates. Angela was raped and murdered, but the case has gone cold. No one does angry better than Frances McDormand, who does her best film work here since “ Fargo” as Mildred Hayes, a recently divorced mother who lost her daughter Angela less than a year ago. Anger is not a disease to be cured but a path on the road to comprehending the world. It is only through that fighting and that rage that other emotions like empathy and understanding can surface. And you should throw a few back and yell at something that unfair. Life will give cancer to relatively young people. Easier said than done, right? How can you not be angry at an unfair world? Life will take children before parents. ![]() ![]() Hollywood likes to teach us that anger is a sin, and that only through acceptance and understanding can we find true happiness. In this “Southern American with an Irish attitude” story from the " In Bruges" writer/director that, like a lot of his work, recalls Flannery O’Connor in tone (the O'Connor quote "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it" could be this movie's tagline), anger is not treated like something to be cured. Anger is an energy in Martin McDonagh’s brilliant “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” one of the best films of the year.
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