Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The film is framed by different forms of blankness. The first shot is of the three shredded and dilapidated billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Each is a fragmented ruin of a past life and meaning — like the characters we meet later. 

In the last the screen is filled with Mildred and Dixon driving to Idaho either to kill or not to kill the rapist who threatened Mildred in her shop, then later beat up Dixon in the bar. He has described having raped someone — presumably while  on duty in the Middle East — but it wasn’t her daughter. 

Their decision remains unknown, a blank, but it doesn’t matter. These former antagonists are at last united, despite her having started the fire that scarred him and his former brutality as a cop.

The subject of the film is how Mildred and the billboards bring each other back to life. She revives them as a ploy to pressure Sheriff Willoughby to move on her raped and killed daughter’s case. That initiative also returns her to a renewed purpose in life. 

Her moral revival spreads to Dixon, when Willoughby’s letter to him encourages a new self-respect and a check on his violent rage. 

It’s not just the town that’s Ebbing. Life, hope, community, self-respect, all seem sapped from the characters whether directly or indirectly affected by the young girl’s murder.

The four main women provide an interesting antithesis. Mildred’s ex’s 19-year old girlfriend and adman Red Wilby’s secretary are two perky ditzes edging into the world of experience. At the other extreme Mildred and Dixon’s mother are hard cases, forged by experience into an indomitable will. The unemphasized turtle in Dixon's mother's lap is an emblem of her son, slow, sheltered, who at the end will come out of his violent shell and leave her to go off with Mildred. 

In the middle stands Willoughby’s pretty young widow, blessed with a loving husband and two delightful daughters but dashed by her husband’s cancer and suicide. Her unintentionally cruel confrontation of Mildred shows her strain and insecurity. 

The Peter Dinklage character James is a dignified counterpoint to the variously swaggering ex and Dixon — and at its worst, the soldier rapist. James is a comic replay of the sheriff’s integrity and character.

This black, salty comedy is distinguished by the range of quirky characters, the brilliant offbeat dialogue and the complexity of characterization. Dixon’s first conversation with the sign-man is a Beckettian (or Abbott and Costello) piece of classic non-communication. Mildred may check her children’s obscenity but spews inspired herself.

And everyone has a backstory. Mildred’s ex may seem a pathetic wife-beater turned  cradle-robber but he’s also in his own way trying to come to terms with his daughter’s loss. Unable to cede Mildred any ground, he burns down her billboards. 

  Mildred seems driven by maternal devotion — but she’s haunted by guilt, after her quarrel with her daughter sent her off to her doom. Her son is twice torn — between needing to turn away from his sister’s loss and his mother’s obsession with it and between his warring parents. 

Even the buffoonish Dixon musters our sympathy when we learn his rage dates back to his father’s death. So does his dependence on his mother. To get his suspect’s DNA he invites a physical beating as if to atone for his own violence before. There’s a double redemption and reconciliation when his own victim Red brings him an orange juice in the hospital. 

Sheriff Willoughby is our first and presiding case of redemptive revelation. Foul-mouthed and angry at the interruption of his Easter dinner, he proves a loving father and husband. His suicide note to his wife turns the hellish world we’ve been watching into the heaven he has found in his family. 
     If we start with Mildred’s view of the incompetent lazy sheriff, we’re turned by his brave handling of his cancer, especially when Mildred comforts his bloody eruption. She moves from impatient anger to "It's okay, baby." He later embraces Mildred by paying the next month’s fee for the billboards embarrassing him. His note to Dixon confirms our sense of an honourable  man caught in a dilemma beyond his easy solution, but simply trying to do the best he can. For everyone.