Though he remains as interested in character as he is in wry turns of phrase and inventive swearing, McDonagh still struggles in his third feature (following In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths ) with basic matters of taste, indiscriminately scrawling his signature comic naughtiness over material that warrants a lighter hand and, perhaps, a more self-effacing presence behind the camera. It’s tough to know where to draw the line between Red’s seemingly compulsive outburst and McDonagh’s own irrepressible tendency toward the juvenile, however much he might aspire to O’Connor’s clear-eyed vision and philosophical nuance.
Soon they’re discussing what Mildred can and can’t put on the billboards, finally agreeing that she’s fine so long as she steers away from defamatory statements and words like “fuck, piss, or cunt”-a list to which Red can’t restrain himself from adding “anus.” As the bereaved protagonist Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) struts through the local sign shop-the first step in her campaign to use the title’s eponymous placards to shame the local police department into finding the man who raped and murdered her daughter-the baby-faced proprietor Red (Caleb Landry Jones) hurriedly stashes away his copy of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
There’s a moment early in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri that neatly encapsulates the playwright-turned-filmmaker’s competing instincts toward moral sophistication and childish self-indulgence.
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