LEGITIMATE HATE AND PAIN

Rating: 8/10 (23 August 2019)

In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh strikes limit situations within an emotional universe that intends to be predictable. The truth is that controlled or socially correct behaviors exist only in the imagination or scripts of movies before the 1970s.
The attachment, however, remains and it is common if we become surprised by the hatred within the protagonist Mildred Hayes, a mother from a small town emotionally torn by the brutal death of her daughter Angela, raped while dying.
Frances McDormand gives a human, all too human, tone to a woman who decides to throw all the pain she feels internally into the external environment: she rents out three billboards to charge Sheriff Willoughby for the murder investigation, which she deems "cold" seven months later.
The sheriff, played by Woody Harrelson in a way we are not used to seeing him, is a compassionate person, experiencing the cancer drama himself, an illness that will soon kill him. Thus, the antithesis of Mrs. Hayes is represented by police officer Dixon, drunk, violent, able to throw people out the window and still be considered slack by his biased mother.
Within this scenario of pain and violence, there are rare moments of tenderness, as when, arguing with Mildred, Willoughby coughs up blood and is called by her "babe". In another scene, Mildred receives an unexpected visit from a deer fawn and jokes that it is an attempt to simulate a reincarnation she knows doesn't exist. But cry.
The sheriff decides to take his own life, which piques the spirits of the small Ebbing community where, as in most inland cities, hate and pain seem to be bad words.
At the end of the movie, what seemed impossible happens and antagonists Dixon and Mildred join forces to eliminate a possible, but unlikely, suspect. From the uncertainty itself, but especially from the certainty of a violation of the law that Hayes assumed unknown, comes Mildred's first smile.