Movie Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Woah. Ok. This film. I saw this last night and gosh, it kept me up. It got nominated for quite a few Academy Awards when it came out, and I saw Frances McDormand’s speech when she won for Best Actress for the movie, and I thought, I should probably see this movie. I’m not super familiar with a lot of Frances’ work, to be honest, but the last movie I saw with her was Nomadland, and her acting was absolutely incredible. There’s just something about her facial expressions when she acts that make you reflect deeply about the film. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she does the same thing, entrancing you with her incredible acting chops.

The film opens up with “Andante” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C (Maria Joao Pires sings the andante) and we see beautiful rolling green hills (even though the film takes place in Ebbing, Missouri, the movie was filmed in North Carolina) and fields of flowers. We also see three torn-up billboards advertising various things. Mildred, played by Frances McDormand, goes into the office of this man named Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones, who played Jeremy Armitage in the horror film Get Out) and has him rent out those three billboards she passes by. Mildred’s daughter, Angela, was raped and murdered, and Mildred is on a mission to find which guy was responsible for raping and murdering her. At first, Red is skeptical about renting the billboards out to Mildred, but she refuses to back down and so he finally rents them out to her. Later, a police officer named Jason Dixon is riding through town when he passes by the billboards, the third one which reads “How come, Chief Willoughby?”, the second one which reads, “And still no arrests” and the first one which gives the main reason why the billboards are being painted in the first place: “raped while dying.”

In the process of seeking vengeance for her daughter’s murderer and rapist, Mildred faces a lot of backlash from the town’s people, and in particular, from the Ebbing Police Department. They think she is too obsessed with this matter, and she tells them they’re more focused on racial profiling than they are on this matter. This movie reminded me a lot of Promising Young Woman. In Promising Young Woman, Cassie puts together a plan for getting revenge on Al, her classmate in med school who raped her best friend and classmate, Nina. However, as Cassie continues her plan she feels self-doubt creep up on her, and feels like no matter what she does to avenge her friend, she is going nowhere and her plan is going nowhere. She meets with Nina’s mom, who tells Cassie that everyone felt like they wanted to do more to help Nina, to not feel like a bystander who just let her get raped and didn’t do anything, there’s nothing much they can do, so they just need to let it go. I felt this was similar to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, because Mildred has the billboards put up and does what she can to speak out against the injustice of Angela’s murder, and meets with the police department to persuade them to give even just a tiny ounce of care about Angela’s murder and finding the guy who raped and killed her. However, there’s a particularly chilling scene where she feels like no matter what she has done, no matter how long those billboards stay up, there’s no way she can get over the grief at having lost her daughter. The scene flashes back to the kitchen and Mildred is arguing with Angela, and before Angela goes out she says that she hopes that someone rapes her and kills her, and Mildred shouts back that she wishes the same. The scene flashes back to the present, and Mildred is standing in the darkened hall of her home, reflecting on that day with guilt, like “Why did I even agree with her that she should get raped and killed? I should have told her to not say that.” There’s another particularly poignant scene (and it was in the trailer at the very beginning. It’s actually the scene that convinced me to see this film because it’s a deeply powerful scene.), and in this scene Mildred is sitting in a field, and a deer comes up and eats peacefully across from her. The deer looks Mildred in the eyes, and Mildred asks the deer, “You’re not trying to make me believe in reincarnation, are you? Because you’re pretty, but you ain’t her.” Mildred wants nothing more than to get Angela back, and not even this rare moment of seeing a beautiful creature can surpass the moments she spent with her daughter.

Overall, this movie gave me a lot to think about, and the acting was really good, and the music was excellent too.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 2017. Rated R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual references.