(Accused at one point of being in the “nigger-torturing business,” he replies, “It’s the ‘person-of-color’-torturing business.”) This is McDormand’s greatest performance since Fargo. Suffice to say that the story also revolves around Officer Jason Dixon (Rockwell), a low-IQ policemen who lives with his mother and has a record of abusing black suspects in custody. This is a film best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible, and I would caution against reading too much about it, as not all reviews will be so circumspect. That’s all I think I should say about the plot itself. As the local priest explains to her: “Everybody is with you about Angela. But Mildred declines to do so, even as the pressure on her rises in town. He also tells her something else, something he believes will persuade her to take the billboards down-something that would persuade almost any normal, decent person to take the billboards down. “I’d do anything to catch your daughter’s killer,” he tells her. After Mildred puts up her billboards, she receives a visit from Chief Willoughby (Harrelson), who appears to be neither inept nor uncaring. McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, whose daughter Angela’s body was found raped and burned by the side of the road. (More ambitious, too, than his second feature, the wickedly subversive 2012 crime-comedy Seven Psychopaths, of which I was an exceptional admirer.) Three Billboards is substantially more ambitious than either. His debut, Six Shooter, won the 2006 Academy Award for Live-Action Short Film his first feature, In Bruges, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. Though it’s set in a (fictional) town in the Midwest, it exists very much in the moral terrain of Flannery O’Connor’s bleak, existential humor, as is made clear by the fact that we first meet one character while he is reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Even for fans of McDonagh-and I am certainly one- Three Billboards is a revelation, and among the very best films of 2017.Īn Anglo-Irish playwright with multiple Tony Award nominations, McDonagh came to filmmaking relatively late. It contains both the most moving scene I saw in a theater this year and the most mordant bit of black comedy. It is by turns heartbreaking, harrowing in its violence, and very, very funny, and it features Oscar-level performances by Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Rockwell. Rather, it is a film that continually complicates and recomplicates itself, denying viewers the comfort of easy moral footing. And Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is assuredly not that movie. The ‘Meta-emptiness’ of Emily in Paris Kevin Townsend, Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Spencer Kornhaberīut Martin McDonagh is not a typical writer-director.