No music soars in tune with her righteous quest. “Pull blood from every man in the country,” she says.Īll our sympathies are with Mildred, and we prepare to join her in the fight for justice, but “Three Billboards” is not that kind of movie. That’s not good enough for Mildred, whose idea of necessity goes a little further. DNA matches have been sought, but without success. As played by Harrelson at his homeliest, he’s a decent man and an industrious cop, and, in this case, he’s taken some necessary steps. On the basis of the billboards, we expect him to be a slimeball or a slacker, but no. The person whom Mildred holds responsible-not for the crime but for failing to solve it-is Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the local sheriff. Her body was set alight, and you can still see the scorched grass where she lay. She takes the step of renting the billboards and having three messages posted on them, against a blood-red background: “ RAPED WHILE DYING” “ AND STILL NO ARRESTS” “ HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?” The victim was Mildred’s teen-age daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), who died less than a year earlier. The main hunter is Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), an Ebbing resident who runs a gift shop.
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The writer and director of the film, Martin McDonagh, is right to accord such prominence to the billboards they get the movie going, and thereby display its wares-bereavement, rage, small-town venom, and the strange spoors that you find yourself tracking when you have to hunt down the truth.
The advertisements that they once bore have peeled away, leaving only scraps and broken slogans (“of your life”), of the melancholy kind that Evans loved. They stand in a misty meadow, with an empty road running beside them and nothing else around. There’s a Walker Evans image, taken in 1936, called “ Houses and Billboards in Atlanta,” and I like to think that Evans would have turned his lens upon the Ebbing billboards, too. As titles go, “ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” doesn’t sound like a movie.