Writer/director (and acclaimed playwright) Martin McDonagh’s well-received comic-singed sardonic drama about a mother’s search for justice after her daughter’s rape & murder, piles on too many unintended consequences, driven less by character or plot than by contrivance. Anything goes, as long as McDonagh finds an opening to the next got’cha plot pivot. 'Didn’t see that coming’ as dramatic self-justification. In a less naturalistic treatment, it’s so cleverly worked out (a cross between Coen Bros. sensibility and THE USUAL SUSPECTS) that it just might have worked. Turnaround with every new piece of info a favored structural device for Asghar (A SEPARATION) Farhadi; perhaps in the stylistically informed manner Todd Haynes gives to classic ‘50s Douglas Sirk melodrama. But here, unadorned and difficult to buy into.* Frances McDormand is the wounded mother, inexplicably dour even before the tragedy, a revenge-mad harpy who advertises her pain, shaming the police on the eponymous billboards for their lack of action on the unsolved case. The twist is she’s nearly as wrong as she is right about her major antagonists: Woody Harrelson’s good-natured police chief; violent off-kilter cop Sam Rockwell; even philandering ex-husband John Hawkes. Fun in a sick sort of way, but not really convincing; as if the action were set in the wrong country. Perhaps McDonagh needs a home field advantage; not Ireland, the stage.
DOUBLE-BILL: *In a film like THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST/'02, Aki Kaurismäki effortlessly gets the tone McDonagh is hunting for.
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