An amazing character study of grief in a small Mid-Western town

Rating: 9/10 (17 March 2018)

My favorite film of 2008 was "In Bruges", the directing debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, and now McDonagh furthers his art with his third film, "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri", a sort of dark comic crime film that is really a complex character study of a disgruntled mother upset at a town's failure to solve the murder of her teenage daughter to the point she rents three billboards outside the town to call attention to the unsolved murder. Frances McDormand plays the grieving divorced mother, Mildred Hayes, in a performance that might even surpass her Oscar-winning role in the Coen Brothers' 1996 "Fargo". She's cynical, angry at the core, street-smart while flawed, and her inner journey is rightly the film's main focus. But she isn't the only character sketch that fascinates in this film. Two other characters display important moral arcs: the town sheriff Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, surprisingly the most likeable) and, most significantly, Officer Dixon (a career best performance by Sam Rockwell that seems the film's most memorable).
The movie's brilliant wit and marvelous interactive dialogue is matched by McDonagh's handling of the actors and control of the visual style, while keeping the humanity of the characters at the forefront as he deftly manages to circumvent the clichÃ©s always found in these kind of movies. Highly recommended as a remarkably composed portrait of small town America, it sends viewers out of the theater to contemplate moral questions concerning justice, revenge, anger and forgiveness. It is one of the year's most entertaining movies.