In some ways, watching this film is like reading those alt-right fashion profiles of Richard Spencer that insisted we overlook his campaign of quiet terror and find common ground with him.
Three Billboards seems to ask audiences to forgive and forget wrongs such as police violence, domestic abuse and sexual assault without demonstrating a full understanding of the centuries-long toll these crimes have taken on victims in real life. It feels like ambiguity, but rather than reveal moral truth, it merely exemplifies McDonagh’s clever engineering.Īpril Wolfe, for LA Weekly, offered the following: They meet somewhere in a vague, indeterminate, and sort of nonsensical middle. As one character spirals downward, another ascends.
It’s entertaining in the moment, but by the end, the movie verges on false equivalencies I can’t really forgive. Rather than give his characters ideas that complicate our sense of who they are - ideas about justice, punishment, fairness, even redemption - McDonagh keeps riffing on the same preordained arcs. So you give a torturer disguised as a cop a heart of bronze, if not quite gold, and on the flip side, you give a grieving mother an anarchic streak. The problem with most redemption narratives, besides the fact their emotional range seems calculated to win awards, is that they bask in the seeming paradoxes of their premise: When you’re literally the worst, it’s counterintuitive for us to see you in any other light. Is there someone out there who believes cops can’t die of cancer or have a sense of humor? Because Three Billboards is the kind of movie to want to milk that seeming contradiction in terms-cop on the one hand, human on the other-for more than it’s worth. What’s obscure, in these contradictions, is McDonagh’s endgame. A Critical Discourse source: Fox Searchlight Pictures These weren’t “It just wasn’t for me” negative reviews, but people who were intent on keeping McDonagh accountable for his problematic portrayal of gender, race and violence. Though it wasn’t the overwhelming chorus of 94 percent from critics, this small consensus made me feel less insane about my reaction to McDonagh’s third feature. When searching for people that shared my intense feelings about Three Billboards, I found that every negative review, in part, echoed my issues with it. It was confounding to think that the majority of critics found McDonagh’s point of view not only digestible, but favorable. Asking an audience to have empathy for a racist, violent policeman and a town that is complicit in his actions was a bridge too far for me.Īfterwards, seeing its 94 (now 93) percent approval rating from critics on was bewildering. It’s a film that irresponsibly creates equal footing between the volatile anger of a mother grieving the under-investigated rape and death of her daughter and a dweeby policeman who suddenly feels kind of bad about torturing black folks. facsimile, but instead got two hours of centrist-right provocation fit to be shown by your local Blue Lives Matter chapter.įilms have upset me before, but Three Billboards had a way of agitating me in a new and foreign way. I was only expecting an enjoyable, if slight, Coen Bros. During its runtime, my emotions ranged from annoyed, to flabbergasted, to outright seething. The third feature from Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, enraged me.