Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, from acclaimed Irish playwright and director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) wasn’t scripted by the Coen brothers but it pays homage to them. It also stars Joel Coen’s wife, the great Frances McDormand, who has been in many of their films, winning an Oscar for her enchanting, pregnant, small-town police chief in 1996’s Fargo.
Here she plays Mildred Hayes, a woman on the other side of the line. Grief-stricken by her daughter’s unsolved rape and murder, stung by guilt that on the night it happened they had rowed, Mildred is pursuing the local police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for not finding the killer. She hires three giant rusty billboards outside town, asking him in giant lettering: “How come, Chief Willoughby?”
When Willoughby calls on her and explains that he himself is dying, Mildred retorts: “I know it. They wouldn’t be so effective after you croak, right?”
For a small town, Ebbing is richly peopled with grotesques. Willoughby’s twisted deputy Jason (the excellent Sam Rockwell), is a hopeless mother’s boy, erratically violent and extravagantly dumb, not even noticing when the police station he is in is being firebombed by Mildred. Her allies in the town include the billboard salesman Red (Caleb Landry Jones) and a drunken, used car salesman with a crush on her (Peter Dinklage, Tyrion Lannister in Game Of Thrones).
This film is made by the performance of McDormand, an actress without vanity, such a rarity that you know it at once when you see it. She is capable of a bleakness, a directness, that makes most tragic acting seem beside the point.
Sour and funny, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the film that the Coen brothers must somehow just have forgotten to make, when they were at their height. Alongside George Clooney’s Suburbicon, based on one of their early scripts, it is another film at Venice that continues the brothers’ career by other means.
