Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Review

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" is a drama with some appropriate comic undertones from Academy Award winning Director Martin McDonagh who wrote and directed the 2007 low budget hit "In Bruges" starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason.

In his latest effort we leave the cinematic cultural vibrant landscape of Europe for the more rural and laid back American Midwest in the small sleepy town of Ebbing Missouri. The story begins about several months after teenager Angela Hayes was murdered with no culprit(s) or a single clue offered to solving her case.

Mildred Hayes (Angela Hayes's mother) played by Academy Award winner Frances McDormand (Fargo) who is highly frustrated by the lack of progress to solving her daughter murder, decides to making a bold move by painting three billboard signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed squarely at William Willoughby (Academy Award nominee Woody Harrelson), the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature redneck mother’s boy with a penchant for violence gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated with more antagonism and personal threats that seem to put the case of Angela’s murder on the back burner of concern. Nevertheless, Mildred is determined one way of another to solving her daughter's death even if it kills her or kills anyone who gets in her way.

REVIEW: "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" at its core is about the extraordinary trauma a parent goes through when grieving the loss of a child, especially through needless violence.

I believe in most cases people in the very depths of despair and grief will often recoil to the privacy of their homes and their personal families, barely living; completely withdrawn from their friends, food and work - just sitting and waiting in an emotional fog for others to come to them with some news of resolution to a family member’s tragic murder. BUT NOT MIIDLRED HAYES, she is fully engaged. Totally motivated with a quiet almost masculine locked jaw resolve to do anything by looking pass anyone standing in her way of accomplishing the goal of solving her daughter’s murder. It’s the brilliance of Director Martin McDonagh to draw on both the normal tragic aspects of grieving and mourning with Mildred’s approach within his screenplay that also offers up a smart, sometimes profane and vulgar, definitely hilarious, violent and sometime karmic look at this kind of relentlessness. With some clever plot point twists intertwined we see with a realistic examination of how rage, under very rare circumstances, can be a productive cathartic mechanism in making some people just better human beings.  

Frances McDormand is both phenomenal and brilliant as Mildred and is an absolute 100% lock to get a Best Actress Nomination as will is Sam Rockwell as the alcoholic, excessively violent redneck momma’s boy Deputy Jason Dixon. Also, Oscar nominations will definitely be coming in the way for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director as well. But the real  greatness of this film, with a running time of 1:15 is that “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is one of those films that keeps getting better and better, more unpredictable and more compelling as it went along. It’s truly one of those rarest of rare films that is more profound and more grounded in reality each and every frame with a subliminal message of inspiration hidden inside its story without ever being overly manipulative, gimmicky or predictable.

A must see film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” with definitely be in my high top ten films for 2017 as one of the more satisfying movies I have seen with its funny and palatable dramatic story about small town life through the tragic prism of loss and redemption.

4 Stars