Three Billboards is so sharp when it comes to depicting Mildred’s pain, and yet so clumsy when it comes to depicting the habitual racism of the place in which she lives, that it feels indicative of the terrible fallacy that we can only focus on one type of oppression at once. The film tells the story of a woman pushing back against the ingrained misogyny of her town, and props it up with a remarkably lukewarm treatment of anti-black police brutality. But while Three Billboards gets at something bitterly real in showing the turn that takes place when a woman's outrage becomes genuinely inconvenient for the powers that be, there's a less laudable way in which it also feels timely. McDonagh, who wrote the part of Mildred eight years ago with McDormand in mind, has stumbled into something that reverberates deeply with 2017’s discourse about sexism - a tale of a small-town crime and cops that gets at what happens when a society runs out of patience for female pain. Anger is destroying her life, but it's also liberated her in a way that - on the heels of the first year of the Trump presidency and the continuing, Weinstein-fueled revelations of harassment and assault - is incredibly cathartic. HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?" Her singularly feminine rage glows so brightly that you could hold your hands up to the screen and warm yourself by its furious glow. She insists on writing what happened in 20-foot-high type: "RAPED WHILE DYING. She is a woman who refuses to let the act of brutal sexual violence that tore her family apart be forgotten, to let it slide into the realm of regrettable but normalized tragedy.
Mildred, whom McDormand plays with a resplendent wrath and heartsick grief, is perfectly positioned to be the fictional patron saint of our current cultural moment.
You could make her into a meme: Here’s Mildred in the pair of no-fucks-to-give coveralls she wears everywhere, except to bed, as she firebombs government buildings, kicks sniggering high schoolers in the crotch, and takes out a series of unignorable ads about how the rape and murder of her teenage daughter remains unsolved. You could put Mildred on a T-shirt, layering her scowling face over selected quotes from the ever-growing mountain of inadequate apologies from disgraced men. There are better movies in 2017 than Martin McDonagh's dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but no performance this year has felt more rawly resonant than Frances McDormand's turn as its caustic heroine, Mildred Hayes.