A HIT AND A MISS
Three Billboards an Oscar front-runner — here’s why there’s backlash
Not only was the darkly comic drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the surprise big winner at the Golden Globes, with four prizes, but it’s also a major contender at the BAFTAs. We might have an Oscars front-runner. Not everyone is pleased. Shortly after the movie was released to almost unanimously positive reviews, the criticism amped up, mainly revolving around the way the movie deals with racism.
Frances McDormand stars as a woman whose daughter was murdered. A year later, with no progress from the police on the case, she advertises her discontent. She rents three billboards, displaying the all-caps words: “Raped while dying and still no arrests? How come, Chief Willoughby?”
This sets up a war in the small town. Most people side with the police chief (played by Woody Harrelson), including his idiotic deputy (Sam Rockwell). McDormand won a Golden Globe and will no doubt get an Oscar nomination, which she deserves. The character she portrays is so unapologetically enraged that watching the movie around its release, shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke, felt particularly cathartic. Critics take issue with Dixon, the character Rockwell won a Globe for playing: a racist cop who routinely abuses his power. (Spoilers ahead.)
Nearly every character seems aware of Dixon’s history of “torturing ” at least one black prisoner in custody, though the film never fully delves into the details. We also see the cop nearly kill a man, who’s white, by beating him before tossing him out a second-storey window.
Dixon doesn’t suffer consequences, though; instead he enjoys a redemption arc.
During a recent episode of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, the four critics weighing in delivered a unanimous takedown of the movie, calling it both “B-grade Coen Brothers” and “bargain basement Tarantino.” Gene Demby, host of the podcast Code Switch, says director Martin McDonagh treated Dixon’s abuses like “a character beat” and let “the interiority of abusive white police officers take precedence over the brutality they visit on people.”
The black characters are sidelined in small roles with plot points that serve to advance the story of the white leads. For example, McDormand’s character Mildred’s closest friend Denise (Amanda Warren) is harassed by the police and arrested as a way to get to Mildred. Demby says when Denise is finally released, she doesn’t seem too bothered by what happened to her — she’s more concerned with how her friend is doing.
“I’m just shocked that so many people liked this movie so much because there’s so much structurally wrong with it,” he said, “but there’s so much morally wrong with it.”
Host Linda Holmes was also troubled by the way domestic violence was used in the movie. When Mildred’s ex-husband (John Hawkes) chokes her, the way she “processes domestic violence is so glib in this way — and I understand that a real person in that situation might do that,” but the movie doesn’t take “a point of view about that fact.”
Meanwhile, Washington Post op-ed writer Alyssa Rosenberg has argued the film “didn’t need its racist cop” and criticized the way the film wastes Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage by relegating him to a role defined by his dwarfism.
As of early December, McDonagh seemed untroubled.
When asked by the L.A. Times about the film’s moral ambiguity, he said, “That ambiguity is exactly what I was going for in it.
“So it’s not a surprise, I think, and it’s nothing I can’t happily defend at any stage.
I think it’s a really good film, and I think often the backlash is kind of a knee-jerk reaction, maybe.”