Maternal instincts

This year’s Golden Globe winner for best motion picture in the drama category, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is now also an Oscar contender. The small-budget film from Irish writer/director Martin McDonagh tells the fictional story of vengeance-minded Mildred (Frances McDormand), whose teenage daughter was raped and killed in the small Missouri town. The local police force hasn’t made any arrests after seven months, so Mildred rents space on three billboards calling the police chief (Woody Harrelson) to the mat.

With the chief’s popularity, the billboards quickly turn most of the town against Mildred. But Mildred is not a woman to threaten: Her pent-up maternal rage means she’s not afraid of police officers, priests, or abusive ex-husbands. One police officer in particular, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an open racist who lives with his mother, seems intent on taking Mildred and anyone on her side down a notch.

This heavy but comical film is rated R, mainly for a lot of cursing and for intense violence, and I’ll underline the violence. One scene shows a suicide by gun, a death that becomes a disturbingly inspirational plot device to reconcile the townspeople.

In one scene the owner of the billboard company is reading Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Director McDonagh has professed love for O’Connor and draws on her dark strangeness. Here, as in O’Connor’s stories, a moment can turn quickly from anger and vengeance to love and reconciliation, even if the story’s arc is not neatly redemptive.

Dark elements aside, the movie is somewhat culturally off, feeling more Irish Gothic than Southern Gothic. Early in the film the local Catholic priest, on behalf of the townspeople, comes to upbraid Mildred for the billboards—a scenario that might happen in Ireland but probably not rural Missouri. O’Connor knew the strange Southern world she wrote about, and it gave her stories more power.