Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (**1/2)

Frances McDormand has certainly found her best role, maybe since Fargo, but the movie simply doesn't live up to her standards. Playing a woman who is in mourning following the rape and murder of her daughter, McDormand is a woman trapped in the 'anger' stage of grief. She swears, kicks, curses, screams. The movie itself takes a more obvious approach, and here is where it began to fall apart for me.

Martin McDonagh is a skilled English director mostly known for "In Bruges." Here he shifts the setting to Nowhere, USA and maintains the same copious amounts of blood and violence. It's a standard flick: Mildred Hayes (McDormand) rents out 3 billboards on a deserted country road near her house (the road is all but abandoned after the highway went up) that call out the police chief for his failure to catch her daughter's killer. The daughter met a violent death, and Mildred feels like the local officers would rather pick fights with black people than actually solve crime. The chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) sympathizes with her but admits that the case has gone cold.

Most of the movie is spent on Mildred, her memories of her daughter, her relationship to her ex-husband (John Hawkes), her quiet son (Lucas Hedges), etc. I found myself wondering why these billboards caused such a stir, especially when we know they are on a back road that few (if any) citizens likely drive down. I also wondered why she assumes the police are all racist, when only one (Sam Rockwell) really shows any distain for his work or presents himself as a villainous creature. The officers we see are mostly respectable, small town men who surely know Mildred and would want to help. Willoughby clearly wants to. We spend a lot of time with his story, too. His family, his wife... There's a major plot element regarding him that I won't share here, but the latter half of the film is overflowing with voiceovers of Harrelson reading letters to various people in the town. It's a bore.

McDonagh is no stranger to violence, and there are several moments out of left-field that left my jaw agape. It's one thing for Mildred to be upset at her situation, but by the end of the film I came to see that there were no real moral characters left. I suppose that's the message here: that violence begets violence. The movie is a dark comedy, but that is one aspect of the story that feels brushed over in favor of wilder visuals and funnier quips. Did I like Mildred? Of course. Frances McDormand has scene after scene of fiery intensity that we don't often associate with the Oscar-winner. She makes the film work with what she was given. It's too bad that she's one of the only elements I found enjoyable.

From segmented flashbacks (can you believe the last thing Mildred told her daughter was "I wish you were raped!" - what irony) to predictable dialogue that didn't knock my socks off, THREE BILLBOARDS feels like a movie that sounded good on paper and then was lost in translation on its way to the big screen. I didn't buy the forced sentimentality of this movie, nor did the ambiguous ending leave me feeling anything other than "that was weird." I am happy that the film took risks and had many twists and turns that I would not have expected. From the first scene to the last, I would never have guessed this is how these characters would end up. It still left me desiring a lot more. It either needed a bigger story or a smaller, more stripped down approach. What this film feels like to me is a gray area that appeals to the masses on violence and gratuity alone. If you can honestly tell me that you haven't seen these same characters a million times over in the past (from the racist cop to the snappy mother to the abusive husband to the grieving wife), then I will tell you you need to see more movies.