![]() ![]() 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. In the old days we called it a low blow.Anger is an energy in Martin McDonagh’s brilliant “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” one of the best films of the year. That’s only one sample of the movie’s allegedly transgressive humor. Mildred responds by kicking her below the belt. At one point a young woman throws a piece of garbage at her car. If Ebbing had a female population of even, say, 50, wouldn’t most of these women want a murderer caught? Yet McDonagh keeps grinding away at the fact that nearly all the locals loathe Mildred for her take-charge attitude. Mildred seems to be one of only a few women in this town. And even though Three Billboards is intended as a wry cartoon, not a realist tract, it still hangs by a precarious plot thread. This is life in a small American town as viewed by someone who seems to have spent no more than a few drive-through minutes in one. He canters through the movie breezily, and it deflates when he exits.īut Three Billboards is more arch than it is truly smart. Still, McDormand’s no-vanity performance is fun to watch, and Harrelson is terrific too. This is what, in writer’s workshops, is generally called a well-rounded, fascinating character, though it’s really just a belabored one. ![]() ![]() She says what she thinks, and it’s usually not so nice. Mildred favors one-piece workman’s wear her haircut looks to have been self-inflicted with a Flowbee. ![]()
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