Great Scene: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”

Facing cancer, Willoughby decides to take fate into his own hands.

Plot summary: A mother personally challenges the local authorities to solve her daughter’s murder when they fail to catch the culprit.

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh.

Like all Martin McDonagh movies, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) features complex characters. At first, police chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) appears to be the story’s Nemesis and the object of Mildred Hayes’ (Frances McDormand) rage. Months have passed since her daughter was murdered and yet there is no progress in solving the crime. This has led to Mildred paying for three billboards to call out police inactivity … and specifically Willoughby.

As it turns out, Willoughby is not a bad guy. In fact, he is dying of cancer. And so one day, he takes his two daughters fishing, then heads off with his wife Anne (Abbie Cornish) to make love out in nature.

Which leads to events which take place that night.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

The big difference between script and screen: Willoughby’s voice-over plays out over many of the scenes preceding it in the script. I imagine that is what McDonagh intended and figured they’d work out the details of what dialogue plays over what images in post-production.

And so by about one-third of the way through movie, the character who Mildred perceives as her enemy is dead. The “baton” of that oppositional narrative function is then passed to Dixon (Sam Rockwell). That’s a whole other story…

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