"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" is a black comedy that banks its effectiveness on Frances McDormand and almost succeeds. Her character, Mildred Hayes, is a force to be reckoned with as she marches into the local rental agency and lays her life savings down on those billboards, blank space she rents to send a message to local sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) that asking nicely every day hasn't accomplished. Specifically, that her daughter has been dead for seven months, raped and beaten and burned alive, and no one has come close to catching who did it. Surprisingly, the action in the first half is from the perspective of Chief Willoughby, not Mildred. It is Willoughby who is pressured to solve the murder and whose terminal diagnosis puts an unofficial time limit on solving the case. It is Willoughby who keeps racist Deputy Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) on the payroll. And for the first half of the movie, "Three Billboards" is effective with its mix of heartbreak and humor that juggles some of today's weightier issues.
Unfortunately, things change when Willoughby (not wanting to waste away in front of his wife and kids) commits suicide about the midway point. With him gone, there's no one to balance Mildred's anger and Dixon's brutality. And while Mildred's character remains consistent, it's Dixon that finds a kind of redemption and changes the most - maybe changing too much within the scope of the story. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell will certainly receive Oscar nominations for their roles in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." I would have preferred the second half to have been a little closer match to the first half.
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