Three Bill­boards Out­side Ebbing, Missouri

Try to define grief and you’ll like­ly end up tongue tied and trounced. Just as that big, unfin­ish­able Sudoku brain­teas­er we call mor­tal­i­ty is some­thing you’ll nev­er quite mas­ter, grief too can be a bitch to unpack and under­stand. It can give rise to ideas and schemes that defy all sen­si­ble ratio­nale. Mil­dred Hayes is hurt­ing hard as a result of the pre­ma­ture death of her daugh­ter Angela. Let’s not beat around the bush: it was bloody mur­der, the kind that any moth­er worth her salt can not and will not for­get in a hurry.

We meet Mil­dred at a moment of divine inner rev­e­la­tion, when her grief takes on a dark­er, more cor­ro­sive­ly acidic form. As played by the great Frances McDor­mand (who is even greater than that infor­mal pre­fix may have pre­pared us for), Mil­dred is a wadded mass of con­tra­dic­tions who is mag­ne­tised towards a course of vio­lent direct action. The first time we see her face up close, in the midst of a sin­gle sec­ond she rides the gamut of emo­tions from worka­day des­per­a­tion, momen­tary dis­ori­en­ta­tion and, final­ly, angry gratification.

And these emo­tions aren’t pro­ject­ed through paint­ed, well-worked expres­sions, but entire­ly in the eyes and the most minute-but-mean­ing­ful lived-in facial con­tor­tions. At this point in her life, God is no friend of Mil­dred Hayes, but through this moment of sub­lime clar­i­ty, one she expe­ri­ences while dri­ving her put­ter­ing, wood-pan­elled fam­i­ly saloon down an unused byway, she still believes there might just be some­body up there keep­ing the lights on.

As much as it looks like it on the sur­face, Mar­tin McDon­agh​’s third fea­ture, Three Bill­boards Out­side Ebbing, Mis­souri, is no sim­ple revenge yarn. The film is about a woman who decides to light a rework up the ass of a man she feels has done her wrong, yet in truth, it’s less about ret­ri­bu­tion and more about why we do it. What does it take to tip a per­son over the edge to poten­tial­ly sab­o­tage their own well­be­ing for the sake of some destruc­tive greater cause?

In that moment, Mil­dred makes a deci­sion, and she knows that to car­ry it out would involve ignor­ing a set of wider con­se­quences. She knows that peo­ple will be offend­ed by her brash actions. She knows that it will unlike­ly have the desired effect. She knows that she will no longer be a fig­ure of pity, but of hatred and deri­sion. She will dri­ve her fam­i­ly and friends away, all for the cause. But, hey, what the hell, right?

Per the title, Mil­dred decides, on what appears to be a whim, to res­ur­rect three musty adver­tis­ing bill­boards sat out in the boonies of the hokey fic­tion­al burg of Ebbing, Mis­souri. With chunky black type on a blood red back­ground – much like the title cards of some French movie from the 1990s promis­ing hard sex­u­al vio­lence – she pos­es a ques­tion about her dead daugh­ter. The police report from sev­en months back claimed she was ​“raped while dying”, and such being the case, why hasn’t Chief Willough­by (Woody Har­rel­son, in ​“career best” mode) got­ten off his rum­pled keis­ter to catch the killer? It’s a pos­er that fes­ters in the minds of the polite towns­folk, but Mil­dred decides to splay it onto the land­scape as both a mon­u­ment to her fall­en kin and a bat­tle cry against those who refuse to ded­i­cate every wak­ing sec­ond to the pur­suit of justice.

What’s great about this film is it’s absolute­ly noth­ing like you expect it to be. The ear­ly trail­ers give very lit­tle away, hint­ing at a broad com­ic tone but del­i­cate­ly swerv­ing the philo­soph­i­cal meat of the mat­ter. McDonagh’s writ­ing toys with arche­types but sends every­thing and every­one in the wrong direc­tion. Mil­dred is paint­ed as a female avenger, phys­i­cal­ly styled after the famous ​‘We Can Do It!’ Amer­i­can wartime pro­pa­gan­da poster that was lat­ter­ly co-opt­ed as an icon of mod­ern, can-do fem­i­nism. Yet she is no mere emblem, and her rea­son­ing, while often extreme­ly enter­tain­ing, often over­looks the deep­er nuances of human com­pas­sion. She’s still can­ny enough not to bring a knife to a gun­fight, trad­ing body blows – lit­er­al and fig­u­ra­tive – with any­one pre­pared to step up. But she’s devel­oped a way of work­ing out how to hit peo­ple in the places where it real­ly hurts.

In the mix, too, is Willoughby’s mamma’s boy pro­tégé Offi­cer Jason Dixon (Sam Rock­well), who the local con­stab­u­lary paint as an essen­tial­ly ​“good man” despite his predilec­tion for tor­tur­ing black sus­pects. His defence is that he’s hap­py to tor­ture folks of all creeds and colours. He’s cer­tain­ly wild, but he doesn’t appear to take any joy in bust­ing the skulls of irri­tant locals. While sat at his desk, usu­al­ly shot­gun­ning cook­ies and flip­ping through the fun­ny pages, he can see one rat bas­tard up through the win­dow – young Red (Caleb Landry Jones), snap-talk­ing hon­cho of the Ebbing Adver­tis­ing Com­pa­ny whose will­ing­ness to play by the rules of cap­i­tal­ism also enables Mildred’s pub­lic tirade. Rockwell’s immac­u­late­ly judged tragi­com­ic turn brings togeth­er self-deter­mi­na­tion and self-loathing. One moment he’s receiv­ing an orgas­mic thrill from the free­dom afford­ed to him by a badge and a gun, the next he’s a bro­ken man, ful­ly aware of his unsta­ble present and grim future.

The script lash­es down twist after twist, but McDonagh’s struc­tur­ing finesse means that it nev­er feels as if he’s just switch­ing things up for the sake of it. In Three Bill­boards, plot twists are equat­ed with the mys­ter­ies of human impulse, account­ing for the fact that a person’s life can change in an instant and it doesn’t have to feel like a clever-clever writer casu­al­ly nudg­ing chess pieces around a board. The film works because McDon­agh nev­er judges his char­ac­ters or their motives. He nev­er hints at who’s right and who’s wrong. Indeed, the very idea of there being a bina­ry solu­tion to any social sit­u­a­tion is sheer madness.

In this sense, the film feels like a drol­ly amus­ing riff on David Fincher’s 2007 clas­sic, Zodi­ac, itself about the fol­ly of search­ing for finite truth. It also brings to mind a Coen broth­ers movie, but maybe not the one you’re think­ing. Mil­dred bears lit­tle in resem­blance to Fargo’s hap­py-go-lucky cop, Marge Gun­der­son, in 1997’s Far­go, but the film does recall works like Miller’s Cross­ing or The Man Who Wasn’t There – both head-spin­ning nar­ra­tive con­trap­tions built on a deep foun­da­tion of melancholy.

It’s a sto­ry that’s jer­ry-rigged to per­fec­tion, but it nev­er feels con­trived or over­ly des­per­ate to make a sin­gle big state­ment. Mildred’s bill­boards act as a totem for a lost daugh­ter and a quest with no dis­cernible end point. The tone skirts between sple­net­ic farce and a deeply soul­ful lament to the pains of mem­o­ry. The dia­logue is tart and tasty, but McDon­agh refused to allow things to stray too far into the realms of the the­atri­cal. Though the orbit­ing play­ers are vital cogs in this ruth­less­ly effi­cient machine, McDor­mand is the crude oil that keeps things purring.

It’s some­thing of a cliché́ to even say it, but she has the abil­i­ty to make you laugh and to make you cry. She makes you love Mil­dred and makes you loathe her too. She makes you under­stand her and dis­ap­prove of her. There is noth­ing easy in this life, and there are no answers to be had, so at the end of the day, you’ve just got to make your move and be done with it. She embod­ies the idea that a flawed human can still be deserv­ing of love.