"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - a new film by director and playwright Martin McDonagh. The film finally puts McDonagh on a par with live classics - Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.
Martin McDonagh is known and appreciated not only in his native Ireland, but also around the world. However, even against the general background, his popularity seems pathological. Snapped up on quotes "In Bruges", and manage to hold theater festivals of his plays (in fact, outstanding). The new, third film of the cult playwright with the awkwardly long but memorable title "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" will strengthen his fame and probably put the living classics to sleep, where Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino strengthened a few decades ago. It is their cinema that is remembered first of all while watching McDonagh - although it has its own unique style, and few problems, and unique talent in writing dialogues, equally poetic-abstract and psychologically accurate.
The heroine of "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" Mildred Hayes - a middle-aged, but independent, strong and strong-willed inhabitant of the fictional town of Ebbing - mourns the death of her daughter, first raped and then killed by unknown persons. The local sheriff started the case a few months ago, but the DNA of the alleged perpetrator did not match the data of the alleged perpetrator, there were no witnesses, and no clues. Mildred decides to spur justice by renting three abandoned billboards near the crime scene and placing a temperamental charge on them to the police. This road is abandoned, no one really goes on it, but the demarche is noticed instantly. First, Mildred is persuaded to retreat and then threatened, but she does not give up, but goes on the retaliatory offensive. Soon the root cause of the conflict begins to be forgotten. The situation is heating up here and now, and the lone warrior is ready to accept the challenge of the whole city. True, the commander of the opposite army - Sheriff Willoughby - also has its weakness: it is hard, and possibly mortally ill.
McDonagh masterfully tightens the knot of intrigue, in which all the characters are tied up - there are a lot of them here, and everyone is not as linear as it may seem at first glance. Mildred (Frances McDormand in one of his best roles, in some way opposite to her own character from "Fargo") is fighting for the right thing, including because he feels guilty. The weak-willed sheriff (recognizable and causing instant sympathy for Woody Harrelson) also suffers from remorse. And next to them there is also a nervous son Mildred (Lucas Hedges, a young man from Manchester by the Sea), a dwarf businessman caring for her (Peter Dinklage, who else), a sheriff’s assistant — a racist neurotic who lives with his mother (the best probably a role for the entire career of Sam Rockwell), and a dozen more minor, no less vivid characters.
First, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" is a film by a talented playwright and a man of the theater: his greatest strengths are a fantastically inventive script and unforgettable characters, for each of whom a perfect performer is chosen. Other aspects, from scenery to sound or camera work, are functional. However, they function, no matter how admitted, excellently.
In a sense, the European McDonagh plays here in the western, making a single woman a woman and a mother. However, the most interesting aspect of the picture is that the usual for the genre division into "good" and "bad" - or at least "guardians of the law" and "offenders" - in postmodernist "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" stops working. Each of the characters has its own truth, and therefore he is confident that he is upholding the order in which the others have turned against him. From this point of view, we have before us a film about the concept of the notorious post-truth. This is not a detective story, and the identity of the murderer throughout the whole picture not only remains unknown, but also loses all meaning. In one way or another, all residents of Ebbing, a quiet pool, in which such a chilling story did not happen by chance, are complicit in the crime.
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI | Official Red Band Trailer | FOX Searchlight
It can be concluded that McDonagh stood in a long line of Directors who issued a sentence to America. However, such a summary would too simplify this bewitchingly strange picture-comic and tragic, realistic and incredible, natural and artificial at the same time.