Tropic Sprockets / Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Tropic Sprockets / Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

By Ian Brockway

Rage, pettiness, revenge and one-upmanship are all hallmarks of the famed playwright and director Martin McDonagh, and he is in fine form once again with his latest film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” It is as compelling and as scathing as any previous McDonagh work, and also uncompromising in its black and blunt humor. This is a story about the perils of grief and what it means to be driven by negativity. It is both uproariously funny and viscerally upsetting.

Mildred (Frances McDormand) is a middle aged mother whose daughter was sadistically tortured, raped and murdered. She is consumed with anger as the case has laid on the police desk for nearly a year with no leads in any shape or form.

Bereft and frustrated, Mildred has no outlet. Then she sees three battered signposts on an unpopular road. What if she managed to post her grievance on the three signs?

Mildred springs into action and soon her impactful question: “Why no arrests? “ is put on three gigantic billboards in a scorching color palette of red and black.

The local police are put on edge. Such bold signage sets a chain reaction of events in motion.

Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) sincerely tries to appease the woman to no avail. Mildred is on the warpath.

Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an ineffectual cop who lives with his harsh mother (Sandy Martin), feels constantly slighted and is driven by violence. Dixon detests the smarmy and hesitant Red (wonderfully played by Caleb Landry Jones) the local advertising manager and decides to pay him a visit.

Mildred finds herself at the center of an outrageous propulsive storm, which she is, in great part, accountable for making.

Though the film is largely delivered by McDormand, no small credit should be given to Sam Rockwell who switches from a pathetic and repulsive creature to a person who you can almost sympathize with, if only a trifle. Not since Mickey Rourke in “Barfly” has there been such a helplessly impotent character whose obstinance is both scarily disturbing yet comical.

The maelstrom of violence is so far reaching and pervasive that it tarnishes everyone in his or her path.

Every character is propelled by the toxic endorphins of revenge and assumed righteousness, coupled by the weight of guilt or physical sickness. No one is safe.

Mildred is a melancholy John Wayne. Like a pale avenger in a Western, she is both alert to absurdity and driven by emotional whims. Stillness kills her. Mildred, born from her daughter’s ashes, lives to settle scores, both real and invented.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” does have a healthy dose of madcap dark humor which is a McDonagh staple, but its unsparing concepts of revenge and justice are equal to any philosophical inquiry, Zen or otherwise.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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