If the billboards were a cannonball into the waters of autonomous justice, than what follows throughout the rest of Three Billboards is the tsunami that Mildred’s painful expression of rage creates. Neither can her son Robbie ( Lucas Hedges), who has to live with the entire town reminding him on a daily basis of the worst thing that’s ever happened in his young life. Too many people have simply accepted Angela’s tragic death as something that happens, something from which the town can and should move on.īut Mildred can’t. Dixon may be a particularly egregious example, a walking caricature of an emotionally stunted racist cop, but he’s endemic of a larger problem in Ebbing. Yet there are still no leads, and Mildred has to suffer Willoughby’s attempts to save face while simultaneously watching as officers like Dixon ( Sam Rockwell) trawl through town, slurrily threatening Mildred in bars and reading comic books at work. He finds the billboards unfair, and says that he and his officers are doing everything in their power to catch Angela’s killer. They read:įor his part, Willoughby ( Woody Harrelson) responds with a predictably disappointing moral appeal to Mildred’s better nature. To return the case to the front of the town’s mind, Mildred goes to the local advertising company, run by the sharp but slow-talking Red ( Caleb Landry Jones), and rents out enough space for three billboards on the edge of town.
Yet the trail has gone cold, because of a lack of DNA evidence and, as Mildred sees it, because of the local police force’s overly lackadaisical attitude about their jobs and the solving of Angela’s case alike. The better part of a year earlier, Angela was found dead on the outskirts of Ebbing, the victim of a ghastly crime that saw her raped, lit ablaze, and left to die. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a frequently staggering treatise on these themes, as seen through Mildred Hayes ( Frances McDormand) and her dogged attempts to bring closure to the violent death of her daughter Angela. (See: Frances McDormand’s Top 10 Performances) At any rate, it’s easier than simply accepting that the world around you is vicious and unjust, that unspeakable things happen to good people for no reason and the evils of the world often win out by luck or happenstance or whatever have you. You enter a void from which you vaguely hope you can return, knowing that you might not. So all of that need to make sense of the patently unreasonable finds its home within yourself, spiraling outward in every personal interaction and in the way you see the world. When wronged, the natural instinct is to seek retribution in return, but that’s so often impossible, for any number of reasons. Rage isn’t a destination, so much as an endless tunnel.