She is averse to taking prisoners or owing favours. Mildred’s wrathful vendetta at the moral impotence of men – her improvised portfolio of brute stares, sceptical eyebrows and thuggish retaliatory kicks - is a festival of bitter-sweet laughter. And at the heart of her, the oil in her motor, is a bottomless well of love and grief.ĭespite the pitch blackness of the story, McDonagh overlays it with ebullient, sarcastic comedy and continues his longstanding commitment to displays of ribald violence. It's anchored by McDormand’s incandescent turn as Mildred Hayes, an implacable firebrand who is part fearless small-town vigilante, part hellish Greek heroine. The film has something in common with Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, which begins with the loss of a child and sets up the prospect of a conventional murder enquiry before veering off into something deeper and more existential. Back at home her intervention causes ructions with her ex Charlie (John Hawkes), now tauntingly hooked up with a young bimbo, while her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) doesn’t thrive in the glare of publicity. It’s not just the town that’s against Mildred. And then there’s the God-fearing town itself which doesn’t take kindly to seeing its sheriff’s competence questioned - even the dentist armed with a drill appoints himself Mildred's judge and jury. Dimmest of the crop is Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a blue-shirted halfwit dressed in a little brief authority. But he’s nothing to the gallery of narrow-minded gargoyles under his command. He seems at first to be from redneck central casting, enunciating obstructive platitudes with a slow suspicious drawl.
They read: “Raped while dying", "And still no arrests?", and "How come, Chief Willoughby?" Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, pictured above) readily snaps to attention, which doesn’t necessarily appear to be a good thing. Seven months on the police have made no arrests, so to get them - and the local media - to notice, her mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) pays for advertising space and plasters three posters on the billboards. The eponymous billboards are stationed on the quiet country road where Angela Hayes died.
Ebbing is everywhere and nowhere, a no-account small town in the faceless epicentre of the Midwest where a teenage girl can be raped and murdered and nothing much will be done about it. The place name is of a piece with Martin McDonagh’s previous visits to half-mythical places: Inishmore, Inishmaan, Leenane.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will become casually known as Three Billboards and its specific location will drift into a vaguely remembered background. It probably won’t take long for the title to be sawn in half.