‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ Redefines The Revenge Story Template (FILM REVIEW)

[rating=9.00]

From the opening shot of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the centerpiece film of this year’s Austin Film Festival, it’s clear that writer/director Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths) is out to make a different kind of small-town story. Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) sits in her car on a lonely stretch of road nestled in the tree-covered hills, staring at a billboard that once welcomed visitors with bright, primary colors.

Now faded and broken down over time, Hayes contacts the local ad agency to rent out all three billboards for the year. With a harsh orange backdrop and bold black letters, Mildred’s message is spread out, but crystal clear. ‘Raped While Dying.’ ‘Still No Arrests.’ ‘How Come, Chief Willoughby?’

The billboards refer to her daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), who was brutally murdered on that very stretch of road seven months earlier, a case where the police have turned up few, if any, leads. The Chief (Woody Harrelson) who’s called out, takes issue with the billboards, and pays a visit to Mildred to try and explain his side of the story. When she’s unconvinced by his plea, he tries to use his cancer diagnosis to gain her sympathy. It does little to move her.

Taking a much larger issue is Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a drunk, borderline incompetent officer with a bad reputation. Fueled with bad advice from his mother (Sandy Martin), Dixon does his best to foster the resentment of the townspeople, and complicate Mildred’s life by proxy.

With a setup as dense as its title is cumbersome, it would be enough to ride out through its two-hour runtime. Instead, McDonagh abruptly veers off course, taking the film, and its characters, into unexpected territory. He complicates your feelings toward each character, from the no-nonsense straight-talk of McDormand’s Mildred, Harrelson’s well-meaning but distracted Chief, and even Dixon’s bully with a badge. Along the way, McDonagh makes every one of them equally likable and unsympathetic, often in the same scene.

It’s a near-perfect movie that completely dismantles the conventions of a revenge movie, and an everyman (or woman, in this case) against the system archetype, then carefully reconstructs it with complete disregard for the manual.

Really, its only setbacks involve a too-long scene with a CGI-deer that proves to be nothing but distracted — and also a bit ham-handed. The other is a flashback sequence that would’ve been necessary to show another angle of Mildred’s plight, but only if another actor had taken the role. As it turns out, McDormand’s performance was more than conveys the overwhelming guilt that she carries throughout the movie, rending the scene irrelevant.

Still, the nitpicking aside, McDonaugh proves that he’s the master of the craft of filmmaking on a whole. From sweeping cinematography that embodies life in a too-small town, to the nuances of his characters, (backed by stellar performances all around) and the razor-sharp dialogue and ever-shocking turn of events that make Three Billboards one of the most fulfilling experiences you’ll see in theaters this year.