Frances McDormand is an actress more fitting to play a a worried mother than any other one I can think of. After all, she stole every scene in 2000's Almost Famous, as the matriarch of a teenager-wannabee-journalist touring with a complex rock band in the early 1970s, and in Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, she once again displays complex emotion, and often in a simple glance. Quick witted and sassy, she insults most people who disagree with her, including the local authorities. This is not a woman you wanna piss off.
After the murder of her daughter goes unsolved, McDormand's Mildred Hayes publicly humiliates local police Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) - a man suffering from a terminal illness, and the only decent officer in Ebbing - by displaying the department's incompetence on the titular billboards in her little rural town. Naturally, her actions draw criticism from the locals, and soon she and her son (Lucas Hedges) are subjects of much scrutiny. A flashback scene involving the last day Mildred saw her daughter, including a fight between the two in which nasty words were exchanged, is powerfully ironic and heartbreaking.
Martin McDonagh here proves that - as he did in 2008's In Bruges - he's one of the finest writers in world cinema today, and in Three Billboards, he creates a post-tragedy setting that is equally comical and somber (a virtuoso one-shot sequence follows an angry officer Dixon, played by a superb Sam Rockwell, as he throws a rather innocent businessman from a 2nd floor window onto the street below; its execution will literally take your breath away). The characters speak real, honest words, not written ones, and there's no villains or heroes - only ... people.
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is a quiet masterpiece, and one of the very best movies of 2017.
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