Sam Rockwell as Officer Dixon with McDormand The conversation evokes Jean Renoir’s words from La Règle du jeu (1939) – “The awful thing about life is this: everybody has their reasons.” Mildred’s refusal to remove the billboard signs – even though Willoughby says he’d do anything to catch the killer, that the law prevents him carrying out widespread DNA testing, and that he is himself dying of cancer – elicits an appalled silence from the sheriff. It’s a form of therapeutic transference, desperate and unwarranted but understandable. That Angela was indeed raped that night as she was dying, and that her body was burned by the killer, explains Mildred’s attempt to alleviate her crushing feelings of guilt by lashing out at Willoughby’s police department.
The exchange ends with Angela snapping that if she can’t have the car then she’ll walk, and maybe she’ll get raped on the way – to which Mildred passively-aggressively retorts that she hopes she does. These details convincingly sketch in the family’s wretchedly dysfunctional history. It’s true, Mildred admits, but she did it only because her husband Charlie had been hitting her. It comes shortly after a revelatory flashback to an argument between mother and daughter: Mildred won’t let Angela use her car because she’s been smoking pot all day Angela sneers that her mother is a hypocrite, as she used to drink-drive with Angela and her brother Robbie in the car. Mildred’s encounter with the fawn is highly reminiscent of the scene in which Helen Mirren’s HRH is fleetingly confronted by a soon-to-be-butchered stag near Balmoral in The Queen (2006) – a metaphor for the hounding to death of another beautiful young woman. Sheriff William Willoughby, ‘Bill’ Woody Harrelsonĭistributor 20th Century Fox International (UK)
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