Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri written and directed by Martin McDonagh

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri written and directed by Martin McDonagh and Dealing with adversity, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, possibly Growth

Three Billboards is an outstanding, intriguing film.

It is nominated for six Golden Globes, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and an Actor in a Supporting Role…

The characters are complex and difficult to bring to the big screen.

None of them is a good guy or a good woman.

Except perhaps for the victim of the murder and rape, but we don’t know much about her and in the little we see her she calls her mother a bitch.

Mildred is the star of the show.

Frances McDormand has an exceptional performance, as usual, in the role of the suffering mother who has lost a daughter.

And this film is about PTSD and eventually PTG:

-          Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that could lead to

-          Post Traumatic Growth

To begin with, we see the billboards from the title that are run down in the first few moments of the motion picture.

Mildred drives to the place that rents them and makes a down payment for the three of them, which will shock the town:

-          Still no arrests

-          How come sheriff Willoughby?

-          The victim raped while dying

This is what the billboards read and they cause an uproar and they are the spark that provokes real and figurative fires.

Nothing happened since her daughter had been raped and killed and Mildred wants the message to be provocative enough to determine the authorities to find the guilty man and not bother innocent people about it.

Sheriff Willoughby is portrayed by the always wonderful Woody Harrelson and he is as complex as the rest of the characters in this motion picture.

He is dying of cancer, but when he tells Mildred about it she is not moved a bit, for she is a tough woman that we feel pity for, while at the same time reject for her extreme actions and foul language…I guess.

She even starts a fire that results in the serious injury of another character that is both loathsome and with some good qualities: Dixon aka the Awards Nominated Sam Rockwell.

Dixon seems to be the only real “bad guy”, with an attitude that seemed to destine him to be the object of hatred for anyone in the audience, but then, after he suffers a lot in the fire set by his nemesis, he changes sides.

Officer Dixon threw the poor man called “Red”, whose only “fault „was that he did his job and rented the billboards to Mildred, from the second floor of his building.

There are quite a few really unexpected events in this film, which might be seen as representing “reality”.

In real life, “main characters” get killed or commit suicide, unlike in the movies, or at least in before or near the end.

Nevertheless, the acts committed by the heroine are outrageous and this means that there is no moral guidance here.

Which again could add to the value of a film that does not take the role of telling the audience what to think:

-          It is not a question of – look, the heroine is always doing the right thing

-          This is the bad guy and we know that all he does is wrong…

Here the heroine gets involved in despicable events and we can only say that this happens in the world.

When someone loses a child, even one or especially one that we argued with and had not given the car to use just before she was murdered, they can go insane, experiencing PTSD that leads them to try and punish the police.

At moments, the very dark, possibly absurd humor that the protagonists are using can be really entertaining.

Just before leaving the stage, sheriff Willoughby is sending the money to pay for the billboards accusing him anonymously.

Mildred’s ex-husband has a nineteen year old girlfriend and the interactions involved are at times brutal and horripilating, and at other times funny.

This is definitely one of the best motion pictures that I have seen recently, with a fresh, original, amusing take on trauma.