Twitter

With her lead role in the new film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Frances McDormand has once again gotten a platform to show why she’s among the very best American actresses working today. It’s also got her near the top of most lists for Best Actress Oscar contenders, an award she won over 20 years ago, for 1996’s Fargo. It’s a character and a performance that feels perfectly tailored to these times: McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a women whose teenage daughter has recently been murdered, and her rage at not only the murders but the lack of any arrests in the case lead her to erect a trio of billboards shaming the local police in the harshest of terms.

It’s that anger in Mildred Hayes that makes her such a timely woman. This isn’t some capricious, unaccountable pissiness, but it does tend to spray across various targets. She’s not quite righteous, though; Mildred is no martyr, and you won’t see her begging for sympathy from her friends and neighbors. She’s willing to play the town bitch if it will get her child some justice … or at least shame those who couldn’t protect her.

It’s not that far a stretch to connect Mildred Hayes to These Troubled Times. That anger she projects is one we’re seeing a lot. It was in the Trump voters last fall who fell in line behind his promises of keeping out the people you don’t like and antagonizing any and all opponents at every turn. It’s there in the people who rail tirelessly against Trump now that he’s in the White House. It’s in Kim Jong Un and Alex Jones and John Oliver and half of everybody on Twitter at a given time. This isn’t to say that every side’s anger is the same, but it’s there. Mildred isn’t fighting for any of us, but her fight feels familiar.

Mildred the character and McDormand the actress are a match made in heaven, too. McDormand was a steadily working actress before Fargo came along, with roles in movies like Raising Arizona and Mississippi Burning. But playing the very decent, very pregnant sheriff Marge Gunderson in the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece was a majorly defining role. Not only did she win the Oscar for Best Actress that year, but she set a template for herself and her characters. Marge wasn’t a hard woman, far from it. But that core of decency comes through in perhaps the film’s best scene, when she questions the criminal she’s finally caught:

The volume is lower, sure, but Marge is outraged just the same. The continuum from Marge to Mildred tracks twenty years of history that will fray the nerves and boil the blood. From Fargo on, McDormand the actress made for quite the staunch character in Hollywood. An actress of her rare ability ends up getting awards on a semi-regular basis, and her speeches have helped build a public persona of narrowed eyes and a steel spine.

Which isn’t to say that McDormand the actress is exactly like Mildred Hayes the character, but they work in concert with each other. McDormand’s reputation as a suffer-no-fools actress helps orient the audience for her character, who not only suffers no fools, sometimes she’ll take a dentist’s drill to them.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is about a great many things. Writer/director Martin McDonagh is looking to engage his audience in a far more complex moral journey than even they are prepared for. One of those things is the collective, tightly-coiled anger we all seem to be feeling right now. Anger like that can feel all-consuming. Frances McDormand’s performance in this movie acts as a release valve for that anger. It’s not only among the best performances by an actress this year, it’s also the most relevant.

Where to stream Fargo