Amazing tale of redemption

Rating: 8/10 (20 June 2018)

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a movie about making extreme choices and dealing with the consequences.
As other reviewers noted, character development reaches new heights here.
All characters, no matter how negative they appear, or how badly they behave, get the chance to show their good side.
The movie starts with a pretty grim settings: the mother of a raped and murdered teen-ager is ravaged by guilt and tries to expedite the investigation (a 7 months old case with no leads and no witnesses) by renting three billboards on a secondary road (where her daughter was murdered on her way home) and displaying three (barely) legal taunting signs addressed to the chief of police.
The main characters are all wonderfully cast (Frances McDormand as the bereaved mother, Woody Harrelson as the chief of police and Sam Rockwell as the dim-witted, macho, racist and closet homosexual cop).
The director plays with stereotypes, but the only constant is that in the end almost all are broken. There is decency in every single character: the letters from the grave by Chief Willoughby are particularly touching, and so are the displays of forgiveness by the two characters that (physically) suffer the most in the movie.
All the individuals are given a chance to redeem themselves (and they make good use of it), with the exception of the unspecified townsfolk.
Small town people cannot stick to their own business, so what should have been a direct confrontation becomes a confrontation between factions, with the typical mob behaviour that is so American.
The ending shows that even in the worst possible scenario there is still hope.
With the rapid decline of our civilisation, we can only believe it's true.