“What’s the law on what you can and cannot say on a billboard?” Frances McDormand asks in a newly released Red Band trailer for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” The Oscar winner plays Mildred, a woman whose daughter was murdered seven months prior. As her question suggests, she’s not looking to put up a typical billboard — she doesn’t want a supersized photo of her late child, or details about a reward. Mildred is planning on using the advertising space to critique the local police, who have yet to find the culprit.
As the film’s official synopsis details, Mildred decides go ahead and make the bold move, “painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (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.”
“It seems to me the police department is too busy torturing black folks to solve actual crimes,” Mildred tells a journalist in the spot. This is not the kind of person who worries about making enemies. The hilarious NSFW trailer shows Mildred verbally — and physically — attacking those who stand in her way. This seems like an amazing role for McDormand, who can communicate what an insufferable moron she thinks someone is using only her eyes.
McDormand won an Oscar in 1997 for “Fargo.” Her recent credits include “Hail, Caesar!” “Olive Kitteridge,” and “Moonrise Kingdom.”
The “Almost Famous” actress has identified the “main point” of feminism as “equal pay for equal work,” which has yet to be realized in the film world. “I haven’t been given that,” McDormand revealed at a Cannes event in 2015. She admitted that she’s only met her quote once — on “Transformers 3” — and still, it was less than an actor in her league would have made. “I worked very hard for that money, I’m very proud of my work. I’m glad I did that film, and I’m proud that I finally got paid what I was told I was worth by the industry,” she explained. “But that is nothing. That is a tenth of what most males my age, with my experience and my reputation as a film actor, make. We’ve never been paid commensurately, and that has to change,” she emphasized.
Written and directed by Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”) “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is expected to hit theaters this year. No word on a specific release date yet.
