‘Three Billboards’ faces backlash
Racist cop character sours many to the film.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is gearing up for awards season domination, leading at the Golden Globes with four wins, including best drama, actress in a drama for Frances McDormand, screenplay for writer/director Martin McDonagh and supporting actor for Sam Rockwell.
The McDormand-led film about a mother, Mildred Hayes, whose daughter has been raped and killed and seemingly forgotten by police, has been largely praised by film critics. USA TODAY credited the movie for “blending black humor and menace and fostering a pervading sense of hope amid a relentless story of revenge.”
Yet even as many critics praise McDormand’s character, a growing number of observers are criticizing Three Billboards’ racist cop, played by Rockwell, and the casualness with which the movie treats his bigoted views and history of violence.
And as Rockwell begins to win awards, the backlash remains. It began bubbling on social media around the film’s release and expanded after Three Billboards began raking in nominations in December, inspiring headlines that call the movie “tone-deaf,” “hopelessly bad on race,” and the cinematic equivalent of a racist uncle.
What’s controversial?
The majority of the backlash is aimed at Rockwell’s character, Officer Jason Dixon, outspoken and lewd, a cop with a penchant for racial slurs who supposedly tortured the town’s black prisoners in previous incidents. “How’s the (n-word) torturing business, Dixon?” Hayes cracks in one scene, to which Dixon replies, “You can’t say ‘(n-word) torturing’ no more, you gotta say, ‘Peoples-of-color torturing,’ ” in a backand-forth that establishes Dixon’s oafish views.
Soon after, Dixon’s boss, Sheriff Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), explains to Hayes that the younger officer has a “good heart,” and that if he “got rid of every cop with vaguely racist leanings, you’d have three cops left and all of them would hate the fags.”
Sure enough, Dixon’s goodheartedness emerges, which gives him nearly equal time onscreen as McDormand’s central character. After a series of personal tragedies, Dixon becomes a changed man and Three Billboards’ unlikely hero.
What is the critique?
Whether the film glosses over Dixon’s racist past in a hasty moral redemption has become the point of contention. Even after an incident where he stages a false arrest and detains Hayes’ colleague Denise (one of the movie’s few black characters with a name) for possession, Dixon goes on to become the movie’s hero of sorts by its final act.
Additionally, the black characters play a much smaller role in the film, and those who are supposedly tortured by Dixon are all but forgotten.
Expressions of dismay
The Dixon character has tarnished many largely positive reviews of Three Billboards. The Washington Post ran the plainly stated headline: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri didn’t need its racist cop.”
“It’s a movie that has a violent, racist cop as a central player, and uses his history of torturing black people as a kind of edgy character detail,” NPR’s Gene Demby wrote on Twitter, describing it as “a movie that’s in large part about a cop who beats up black people — to say nothing of the black woman (Denise) he throws in jail as a way to get back at Mildred — but the movie is mostly concerned about *his* feelings. Not the damage he’s done.”
In the Pacific Standard, writer Hanif Abdurraqib pointed out how few black characters are included in the film and how callously their stories are treated, particularly when it comes to Dixon’s unanswered-for crimes: “Black people in this movie largely exist as victims, seen and unseen, of the town’s violence, and as I watched I found myself wondering why they existed there at all.”
And in the Daily Beast, writer Ira Madison III compares Three Billboards with Crash, Paul Haggis’ controversial Oscars best-picture winner that faced the same criticisms of using black characters’ suffering as a mechanism for the white characters’ redemption narratives. Three Billboards “attracts the type of crowd that likes to reward simplistic tales of racism like Crash, where white people learn how to be good to one another at the expense of black people,” Madison writes, calling Dixon’s storyline “the type of journey that will surely tug at the heartstrings of industry voters and might just lead to awards success.”
What about the Oscars?
With an important win and SAG nomination paving his way to the Oscars, Rockwell probably will be a front-runner in his category. While Gold Derby’s awards experts predict Willem Dafoe will win the bestsupporting-actor trophy for The Florida Project, Rockwell has the second-highest odds, and they’re rising.
Meanwhile, McDormand’s furiously committed perfor- mance seems destined for a win and is the site’s far-andaway favorite. And the film is inching up in Gold Derby’s best-picture race, sitting at second place behind Lady Bird.
The criticisms of Three Billboards didn’t appear to slow the film’s momentum going into the Globes, though its big wins could increase the scrutiny. Either way, the awards season conversation around Three Billboards will likely be as fiery as the film itself.