If you thought Frances McDormand couldn’t find a character as rich in detail and emotional resonance as Sheriff Marge Gunderson in “Fargo,” allow me to introduce you to Mildred Hayes, the grieving small-town mom at the center of writer-director Martin McDonagh’s bracing drama “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
The billboards in the title are on a road near Mildred’s house in Ebbing — and it’s in front of one of them, we learn, that the body of her daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton) was left, burned to a cinder, after she was raped and murdered. And it’s these billboards that Mildred rents out, to write a pointed message to Ebbing’s police chief, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), asking why there have been no arrests in the case, seven months later.