Frances McDormand has won an Academy Award, a Tony and an Emmy, which today I learned is called the Triple Crown of Acting. Also, Frances McDormand swears good. That’s the main takeaway from the red-band trailer for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, from writer-director Martin McDonagh, whose hitman movie In Bruges seems to be a cult favorite. The actor most famous for playing canny and squeaky-clean sheriff Marge Gunderson shows the opposite — vulgar, unconstrained fury — in the first Three Billboards trailer.
McDormand is Mildred Hayes, whose daughter was murdered. The police aren’t doing enough, so she erects billboards to shame them. And calls them fuckheads. This is music:
While this Three Billboards red-band trailer is full of violence, it looks like Mildred’s main tactic will be out-swearing her fellow townsfolk, verbally bullying them into the ground.
Other big takeaway: holy shit, what a cast. Three Billboards has got Woody Harrelson, Peter Dinklage, Sam Rockwell, Clarke Peters and national treasure John Hawkes.
Here’s the official synopsis, should you want more of the plot:
After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (Academy Award nominee Woody Harrelson), the town’s revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature mother’s boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing’s law enforcement is only exacerbated.
But wasn’t that swearing enough? Who doesn’t like swearing? Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri doesn’t have a release date yet.
