IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (B. Tallerico) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review
Three Billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri [2017] (written and directed by Martin McDonagh) is a pretty stark and dark film about a terrible tragedy that beset both the fictionalized town of Ebbing in rural Missouri and then specifically the Hayes family living at its outskirts.
Some nine months previous to the story's telling, 19-year old Angela Hayes (played briefly in a flashback by Katryn Newton) had been savagely raped and murdered as she was walking to and/or from said home at the outskirts of town and ... there were _no leads_. The perpetrator's DNA didn't seem to appear on any database, it happened at night, off a rural road; the local Sheriff Bill Willoughby (played quite wonderfully by Woody Harrelson) was convinced that the crime had been committed by a passerby, a drifter, who probably wouldn't be found until he was caught bragging about it in some dive somewhere, or perhaps already in prison.
But tell that, of course (and he did, repeatedly, both as sympathetically and at times exasperatedly as one could imagine) to Angela's mother Mildred (played to certainly Oscar nomination levels by Frances McDormand). She's the one who pays for a year's worth of advertising on those three billboards on a rural road near where she lived / near where the crime occurred, hoping to embarrass the local police into "doing something." But ... sigh ... what was there to do that was not already done?
Dear Readers, this is a film different than advertised. It's _not_ really about "getting the Authorities to do something." It's above all about the horror (and horrific after-effects) of a crime. Yes, one can understand Mildred's desire for "closure" (which she quite understandably takes to mean at least in part "catching the monster" who did this to her daughter). But ... honestly _how_ does one "close" this kind of a wound?
The film struck me as surprisingly similar in its thematics to a seemingly far gentler film (until...) named A River Runs Through It [1992]. Yes, horrific tragedy can _change_ people ...
"Friend and neighbor you have taken away from me,
My only companion is darkness." -- Psalm 88:19
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