frances mcdormand three billboards outside ebbing missouri

As with unblinking depictions of anywhere, it contains unsavoury things, but it’s not in the business of simplifying or sanitising reality, or of sorting it into right and wrong. Three Billboards is not a medieval morality play: it’s an unblinking depiction of (largely) white working-class America. McDonagh has responded, contesting the idea that Dixon is redeemed and describing his film as “deliberately messy and difficult”. The criticism centres partly on the Peter Dinklage character, whose dwarfism is a frequent catalyst for humour, as well as what has been perceived as a redemption arc for Dixon, who we are lead to believe has tortured a black man in custody, and is treated by the film with both derision and affection. Not all those feelings are nice ones, however, and McDonagh’s film has suffered a bigger backlash than the rest of the best picture nominees put together. Photograph: Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox Peter Dinklage as Mildred’s friend James. It’s a film designed to make you feel before you think.

Later, McDonagh has you still sobbing from a previous plot development during a shot of Dixon singing along cluelessly to Abba’s Chiquitita. A highly amusing exchange between police chief Willoughby and his imbecilic colleague Dixon ( Sam Rockwell) ends with a brutal jump cut that leaves you still grinning as a photograph of Angela’s burnt corpse flashes up.

But in this scorching, luminous tragicomedy, the sadness is sadder, the jokes more outrageous, and the space between the two smaller. McDonagh has long coaxed comedy from the friction between the idiotic, the unthinkably painful and the banal. Three Billboards is staggeringly entertaining – its script performs a series of hairpin turns with a mastery that leaves you agog.

Her decision is the breakneck, blackly comic plot’s starter pistol, igniting a reaction in her fellow townspeople that ranges from mild disapproval to incandescent fury. The opening sequence lingers longingly on the three decrepit billboards soon they will be rented by Mildred Hayes ( Frances McDormand) in order to draw attention to the floundering police investigation into the murder of her daughter Angela. In keeping with writer and director Martin McDonagh’s taste for fastidiously literal film titles ( Seven Psychopaths, In Bruges), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is about exactly that.

Frances mcdormand three billboards outside ebbing missouri