If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with McDonagh. Nothing he writes is remotely surreal, not even when he sets his work in an unnamed totalitarian state. But he lets his imagination loose on the real world in a way that puts self-conscious fantasy “world builders” to shame.
McDonagh exploded into the theatrical firmament in the 1990s with three linked plays he wrote in just a few months about a village in rural Ireland called Leenane. The first and best, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is about a 40-year-old spinster living and squabbling day and night with her wreck of a mother in their cabin home. She gets a chance at happiness with a man who is emigrating to America, but her mother intercepts the letters he sends her and he moves on—and the daughter makes her mother pay.
McDonagh’s works bristle with wild comedy, tension so extreme you watch the action with your hands over your eyes, vivid bursts of violence, and moments of aching sadness. “Guns, explosions, blood”—that is how McDonagh once described his plays, which captures everything about them but their artistry and the clever revelations of both character and story that make them so memorable. He is a brilliant plotter who makes you think what you’re watching is one kind of story when suddenly the action turns on a dime and you learn it is something entirely different.
McDonagh has now released the third movie he has written and directed—and it is the first that truly reflects the head-snapping surprise of his stage work. It’s called Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Seven months after her teenage daughter’s rape and murder, a working-class woman named Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) puts up a message on three successive billboards near her house attacking the local police chief for failing to find the killer. Her impulsive act enrages the secondary officers in the town police department, who are unswervingly loyal to Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). She makes a particular enemy out of the disgraceful and stupid Dixon (the extraordinary Sam Rockwell), who has been accused of torturing an African-American prisoner in a jail cell.
The chief does not share the rage of his underlings. He explains to Mildred that there are just some cases where you can’t catch a break; no one in the criminal databases across the United States was a match for the DNA recovered from her daughter’s body. Mildred responds by demanding samples be taken from everyone in town and, failing that, everyone in America. He then tells her he’s dying of cancer. She says she’s heard. This is only the first 10 minutes of the movie, after which everything gets wilder still.
Mildred resembles Olive Kitteridge, the character played indelibly by McDormand in 2014’s great HBO miniseries of that name. But where Olive is a hard nut, Mildred is pure vengeance. She is no longer afraid of anything or anyone and cares not a whit for the good opinion of her town. Why should she? She lives a waking nightmare in which she cannot help but flash back to the last moment she spent with her daughter Angela—when she refused to let Angela borrow her car, and Angela shouted that she hoped she got raped to show her mother she was unfair . . . and Mildred shouted back that she hoped so too. Mildred is one of the great characters in recent cinema, and if McDormand doesn’t win an Oscar for this next February, someone should put up three billboards just outside the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood demanding justice.
If this were a conventional movie, I would say Three Billboards is a story about the consuming nature of grief or the way in which a consuming injustice spreads to poison an entire community. But it’s not a conventional movie. McDonagh is a visceral artist whose work is really about what happens when openly confrontational people who are not above using petty violence meet others who are exactly like them. He sets a plot in motion, releases the ids of his characters, and sees where it all goes. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is funny and foul and shocking, not very pleasant but continually surprising—for, as it turns out, it isn’t really about Mildred at all.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
