Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Review

The performances are not in question. Frances McDormand plays Mildred as a woman who has converted grief into a weapon and knows exactly what she is doing with it, Sam Rockwell finds something genuinely frightening in an incompetent bigot, and Woody Harrelson supplies the only uncomplicated decency on offer. McDonagh writes scenes that land like stage pieces, and the dentist chair and the letters read after a death are as good as anything in his theater.

Ben Davis shoots Missouri plainly and Carter Burwell scores it like a western. The trouble is what the script asks us to do with Dixon. The film establishes that he tortured a Black man in custody, then routes him through a fire, a letter and a shared drive toward a possible murder, and requests something close to grace without ever letting his victims into the frame. Missouri here is an Irish playwright's idea of Missouri, and the racial politics are used as texture. We grade the acting at the ceiling and hold the whole at a B.