Review: On Violence and the Pain of Others in ‘Three Billboards’ (Published 2017) (2024)

At one point in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Frances McDormand tears the movie open, showing you what a broken heart looks like. It happens during an uneasily intimate encounter between her character, a tough number named Mildred, and an ailing police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). Until then, Mildred has seemed impervious to his pain. She has rented three billboards attacking his failure to solve her daughter’s murder — one reads “Raped While Dying” — and has been so wrapped up in her hurt that she hasn’t seen anyone else’s. When she realizes how sick Willoughby is, she looks at him as if for the first time. She’s staggered, and so are you.

The pain of others haunts “Three Billboards,” at least whenever the writer-director Martin McDonagh lets it. A playwright (“The Pillowman”) turned filmmaker (“In Bruges”) who’s somewhat of a subgenre unto himself, Mr. McDonagh is a pain artist whose tools include absurd violence, cruel laughs and sucker punches. He skated through his last movie, “Seven Psychopaths,” a barely there comedy that pivots on a creatively stalled screenwriter. As this précis suggests, Mr. McDonagh doesn’t have much to say in that movie — it has a bunny, stolen dogs, guys with guns, good and bad jokes — but what little is said is said by very fine performers grooving on all his words and larky nonsense.

The movie opens on low boil with Mildred behind the wheel of her station wagon near three derelict billboards. It’s an inviting landscape smudged with soft color, but as she stares at the signs with furrowed intensity, she chews on a fingernail so ferociously she seems on the verge of tearing it off. The billboards aren’t blank — the faded image of a baby smiles down from one, the word “life” pops off another — but they’re the opening pages in Mildred’s opus. Stamping black text against a blood-red background, she uses the billboards to announce her crusade while Mr. McDonagh (who likes self-aware gestures) lays out the story’s fundamentals: its setting, characters, problem, plot and possible villain.

The billboards are a gimmick for Mr. McDonagh and a gambit for Mildred, a way to get things jumping (the investigators, the tale) and splash some foreboding on an outwardly pacific scene. Much of the story involves the ripples of outrage, confusion and buffoonery that the billboards inspire and that soon envelop almost everyone Mildred knows. Months after her daughter’s death, grief has walled her in; isolating and seemingly impenetrable, it is inscribed in the hardness of her gaze and in her grim new identity as a mother of a dead girl. The billboards turn that grief into a weapon, a means of taking on the law and assorted men — a threatening stranger, a vigilante dentist and an abusive ex (John Hawkes) — who collectively suggest another wall that has closed Mildred in.