Jeff's Reviews

Thoughts on every movie I've ever seen.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Directed by Martin McDonagh

Starring Frances McDormand, Caleb Landry Jones, Kerry Condon, Sam Rockwell

Author

Nice little story, with a good mix of laugh and cry. With the fun characters, offbeat humor, obscure but interesting location, and Frances McDormand, it feels a lot like a Coen brothers movie. The mix of drama and comedy is delicate, though. If the comedy is any goofier, the whole thing falls apart.

Great performances and a few great lines. McDormand carries it well. Rockwell does a great, Oscar-worthy job playing a very complex character. In any given scene, he’s some combination of dramatic, tragic, funny, and contradictory. Caleb Landry Jones is an interesting up-and-comer. Hawkes is a young Chris Cooper. An understated Dinklage is great, too. Only thing that threw me was why Willoughby would have an English wife in the heart of Missouri.

I get that ambiguous endings are cool, and sometimes they really work, but was this one a bit too open-ended?

McDonagh doesn’t direct much, but when he does, it’s definitely something interesting.

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