IT’S A SHAME ABOUT COMPASSION
FILM’S MESSAGE OF UNIVERSAL HUMANITY IS A REMINDER TO LAY OFF THE SWARMING
It’s unusual for a Hollywood movie to feature hateful characters who are also lovable and sympathetic. It’s even more unusual for a Hollywood movie to pull the trick off successfully.
Director Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri manages both feats. The film is full of cruelty, sexism, racism, and police brutality ( among other upsetting things), but it refuses to itself be cruel to the characters guilty of these sins; a wellneeded reminder that as human beings, people deserve compassion and dignity even when they have failed to show the same to others.
This is an excellent movie within the confines of its own characters and storyline: Mildred Hayes ( Frances McDormand) puts up three controversial and explicit billboards calling out the town’s endearing Sheriff, Bill Willoughby ( Woody Harrelson), for not finding a culprit in her daughter’s rape and murder. But the movie is also relevant to the current culture of shaming and destroying the reputations of people who are — or are suspected to be — racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise intolerant and bigoted.
Watching Three Billboards, we see that people who do and say horrible, godawful things can have love and empathy deep within them, as well — qualities that reveal themselves only when these people are treated to love and empathy too, despite their very real transgressions.
Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) is a violent, overtly racist, and inept policeman. At one point, we witness him brutally beat up and push a man out a second- floor glass window onto the street below.
But Sheriff Willoughby believes in Dixon, seeing what others in the town ( and presumably we movie viewers) do not: a hurt and frightened man who has the sensitivity and smarts to be a good police officer and a good person. We see Dixon become at least the latter, once he is shown tenderness and care, rather than slurs and violence in return for his own.
Dixon deserves worse; yet everyone is elevated when he receives better.
Similarly, we sympathize with Mildred Hayes because she’s lost a child and has suffered at the hands of a physically abusive ex-husband (John Hawkes). But she’s also a bitter, brusque woman who thinks nothing of repeatedly humiliating her surviving child ( a supportive teenage son played by Lucas Hedges), tormenting Sheriff Willoughby despite knowing that he’s dying of cancer, and committing more than one audacious act of destruction and violence ( including turning a drill on her dentist).
Strange, then, how heartening it is when Mildred finds an unlikely ally who forgives her for the harm she’s done. And even stranger, perhaps, how inspiring it feels to see her make a degree of peace with her violent former spouse (and his teenage girlfriend), even though he hasn’t “earned” it.
Cheering for a wife- beater? Rooting for a racist? Is this movie devoid of a conscience? Just the opposite, actually. Three Billboards makes us take the perspectives of the haters.
It’s unpleasant and difficult, but once we’ve seen where these people are coming from — and realized that hatred lives in all of us as surely as does love — revenge suddenly seems less appetizing than mercy.
The triumph of Three Billboards is that it doesn’t ignore cruelty or suffering; it highlights their inevitability and pervasiveness. And then it suggests a gentle way forward.
Clearly Dixon fully merits the insults hurled at him, but they don’t make him any less racist or violent. They make him angry and defensive. Which makes him more racist and violent.
Despite being a white police officer ( a white- privilege double whammy), Dixon is a poor, lonely man — the product of a troubled childhood — stuck living with his disparaging mother in a depressed rural town.
Dixon doesn’t change when he’s called out. He changes when someone he respects shows him respect and understanding. Then he can listen.
Compassion isn’ t a cure- all. Sheriff Willoughby is going to die, leaving his wife and children grieving, no matter how kind and humane he is.
And forgiveness is not condoning horrible behaviour. Dixon is fired as a policeman and quite rightly doesn’t get his job back even after his heart softens and he does considerable good.
Yet compassion and forgiveness still make an ugly world more bearable. And they are the exact qualities that today’s virtue vigilantes seem to lack on all sides.
It wasn’t compassionate or helpful for Wilfrid Laurier professors to harshly dress down, discipline, and bring to tears an earnest TA who played clips from public television that the professors considered insensitive. It wasn’t compassionate or helpful for supporters of the TA to send one of the professors a death threat.
Maybe it’s time, instead, to lay off the Twitter swarming and callouts for a moment to consider the universal humanity Three Billboards highlights.
COMPASSION MAKES MAKE AN UGLY WORLD MORE BEARABLE.