'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' affirms that racist violent cops are actually good guys
- Thread starter AuthenticM
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The OP is baffling, to be quite honest. I seriously cannot understand how someone watches Three Billboards and then writes... that. This movie isn't about any of that. The ending itself totally undermines what you're trying to say.
Dixon was wrong in thinking the guy at the bar was guilty of Angela's murder. What he thought had been a life-changing moment... wasn't. He's still fucked up. Since he is still an awful person, he decides to talk to Mildred and they both go to Idaho to probably shoot this man, just to try to feel better about themselves. So, these two awful people ride into the sunset, still stuck in their own personal cycles of violence, unwilling or unable to escape them. Ebbing is still a fucked up place, it's still riddled with racism and bad people. None of the characters find redemption - actually, the movie seems to ask if it's possible for someone under these violent circumstances to find redemption.
Yeah, that is the real issue the film has w/ that aspect, it uses that as a prop.
This criticism quickly falls to the wayside once you realize that greatest villains of all time throughout film, literature, and history itself are complex and sympathetic individuals. As one example, "My Friend Dahmer" is a 2017 biographic movie about Jeffrey Dahmer. It wasn't designed to make serial killers feel better about themselves. It was made to show that this monster of a man was once as normal as anyone else. The lesson is where/how/why things went wrong.
The only 'intellectual travesty' is your reductive and puerile analysis of one of the most honest and brutally unflinching portrayals of flawed and complex people I've seen in recent memory.
There are no 'heroes' in the film and there certainly is no redemption. Practically everyone in this movie is damaged on some level and many of them, for various reasons, are broken, either by design or by circumstance.
I was floored by this movie, specifically for how it courageously refuses to deliver the audience even the slightest respite from the brutal truth that people are often complex, paradoxical creatures capable of both profound generosity and genuine cruelty and inhumanity.
Sorry OP but you've missed the point of this film entirely.
There are no 'heroes' in the film and there certainly is no redemption. Practically everyone in this movie is damaged on some level and many of them, for various reasons, are broken, either by design or by circumstance.
I was floored by this movie, specifically for how it courageously refuses to deliver the audience even the slightest respite from the brutal truth that people are often complex, paradoxical creatures capable of both profound generosity and genuine cruelty and inhumanity.
Sorry OP but you've missed the point of this film entirely.
There's a difference between "this guy's a racist piece of shit but layers tho" and Walter White.
I'm not saying your wrong I'm just saying context definitely helps and certain traits are more engaging than others for those purposes.
It's sooo complex because there's gray morality and it's all about how the cycle of violence perpetuates: that's not deep or complex. That's basic middle-school comprehension level insight that McDonagh gleans by systematically belittling and marginalizing every minority character in the film to focus on two boringly one-note sadists, taking side roads along the way for bafflingly self-inflated writerly speeches like Mildred's rant about priests that makes zero sense but probably helped McDonagh feel like he was some genius scribe when he put it to paper. Violence begets violence? People are neither wholly good nor bad? Holy shit I had no idea what are you a philosopher. If the movie were even remotely entertaining some of this would be easier to overlook but the humor of his previous movies is pretty well absent and the plotting is momentumless. Plus the film makes a conscious effort to centralize itself in Middle America—it's right there in the title—a place it becomes inescapably clear McDonagh knows fuckall about.
Yeah this.
I read it in a book about polio. Or was it polo? The one about the horses.
Your reading of the movie is one thing, but you're omitting scenes that literally goes against what you are arguing.
Your argument for every instance of stupidity in a film cannot be "it was supposed to be stupid" unless you can dig up evidence for the satirical interpretation in the text. (For one example: Starship Troopers, where the surface seems to be brainlessly jingoistic and bloodthirsty but stylistic echoes of propaganda filmmaking, the costumes, and the heightened performances make reading it as a critique of fascistic tendencies and the military-industrial complex very possible.) That speech in Three Billboards sure looks like something the film thinks Mildred should be proud of, as she calls out perceived hypocrisy and the priest follows it by leaving. Your argument, then, is that it's actually supposed to be dumb and annoying, and we're supposed to realize the reductiveness of her comparison between the priesthood and bloods and crips and conclude that the situation of corruption and sexual abuse in the Catholic church is more nuanced than that? I find that quite a reach and even still: it's not a very good point. Oh, it's a complicated situation? No duh. It doesn't make you a genius to constantly point out that things are nuanced. It makes you conscious.
I thought it was pretty clear by the end that mildred and the cop are both monsters and bad guys, one bEcause he is from from the beginning, the other through desperate circumstance.
First of all, let's use that nuance to make sure that what you just said is completely irrelevant, because this is an argument about one scene, not "any instance" of anything.
My argument (which I'll make, thank you), is that this shows Mildred as a bitter, angry woman, who is not willing to listen to anyone to the point where she makes up shitty rants and then walks off when people can't counter her nonsense.
I don't think I or anyone else ever made that claim. I also don't see how saying "No duh" invalidates what the movie was trying to portray. I'm not sure how that even relates to this argument right now, about that one scene not being a "win" for her. You just come across as hateful, tacking that on.
The more I think about 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri the more I dislike it. The film's bleak violence, obtuse morality, and unreality to the film's world feels like a tone deaf distorted image of other better works. It is a Xerox of a Xerox of Xerox of the first half of a Cormac McCarthy novel. It channels McCarthy's nihilism, but with none of the inertia or understanding that his works have. Reciting profound insights on the human condition does not mean one understands what is being recited. The film argues that in trying to work through trauma that others have inflicted onto us, we in turn become the tormentors of someone else. We mismanage our trauma. It is a recursive cycle that perpetuates itself. That is the film's core argument, that I get - I just think it arrives there in the most clumsy way possible. And I think that is what the OP is trying to get at. In the context of our political climate, having the film tell us that its racist person in power is as good and as bad as the victims around them feels gross - it is the closest a film can get to saying "Both Sides".
My general statement isn't "irrelevant" because we're talking about one instance. You mean you only want to discuss that one instance, fine.
You were always free to make your own argument, you just didn't before so I had to try and figure it out myself from your one-sentence flip rhetorical. Yeah, Mildred is bitter and angry. That readily apparent, it's the surface of the film. I'm not sure what you're saying is a purposefully illogical and badly written rant is necessary to communicate that, as it's already obvious and shown repetitively throughout the film, but I'll admit it does do that.
For clarity's sake, your last quote of me is directed at McDonagh, not any viewer. "No duh" is glib, yet pretty firmly relates to this specific scene and summarizes my reaction to the film: thuddingly obvious and sophomoric.
Yes, this is well-argued. I'd even say it's a triple Xerox of an adaptation of half a McCarthy novel, McDonagh very much steered into Coens connections (right down to casting) and the comparison does him no favors.
Ya know OP, I did not even think about that when I was watching it, but you're pretty spot on about the problematic message it sends out. Thanks for giving me something to think about, I gotta re-evaluate my own thinking too if I didn't come to this conclusion until prompted.
I like him but his role in this movie felt like it was cut out so much. There must be another cut where he was actually in the movie more than like 3 scenes
Martin McDonagh addresses the Three Billboardsbacklash
"It mostly comes from the idea of Sam Rockwell's character, who's a racist, bigoted a—hole, that his character is seemingly being redeemed, maybe," he says. "I don't think his character is redeemed at all – he starts off as a racist jerk. He's the same pretty much at the end, but, by the end, he's seen that he has to change. There is room for it, and he has, to a degree, seen the error of his ways, but in no way is he supposed to become some sort of redeemed hero of the piece."
"But I don't like films that everyone loves. And we're not making films for six year olds, we're not making The Avengers. We're trying to do something that's a bit little more difficult and more thoughtful."
http://ew.com/movies/2018/02/08/martin-mcdonagh-three-billboards-controversy/
"It mostly comes from the idea of Sam Rockwell's character, who's a racist, bigoted a—hole, that his character is seemingly being redeemed, maybe," he says. "I don't think his character is redeemed at all – he starts off as a racist jerk. He's the same pretty much at the end, but, by the end, he's seen that he has to change. There is room for it, and he has, to a degree, seen the error of his ways, but in no way is he supposed to become some sort of redeemed hero of the piece."
"But I don't like films that everyone loves. And we're not making films for six year olds, we're not making The Avengers. We're trying to do something that's a bit little more difficult and more thoughtful."
http://ew.com/movies/2018/02/08/martin-mcdonagh-three-billboards-controversy/
Lmao. Its either black or white, I'm incapable of detecting nuance. Can an abhorrent person self reflect? Will Thanos acknowledge the error of his ways?
I mean, he shouldnt need to say this. I pretty much got all that from watching it. Loved the movie, it really didnt go as i expected it to. Nice, complex characters.
First off, I liked the film. But I also liked Wolf of Wall Street and felt that, too, had an obvious disparity between the filmmaker's intent and how many (not saying the majority, just many) interpreted their depiction of unsavory characters in that film. I was one of these people with Wolf of Wall Street. And while I don't think Rockwell's character is "redeemed" at the end of Three Billboards, I think at the very least he's rendered in a more sympathetic light that I can understand people having an issue with.
Rockwell's character is rendered as some who is bigoted and stupid, but that also comes from a family where he was arguably not nurtured. He's a loser who lives at home with his mom, who loses arguably the only person who saw some deeper potential with him, and then spends the latter half of the film exhibiting at least some admirable qualities. He picks up on a conversation with someone who anyone would suspect as being the killer - especially after it's set up earlier in the film w/ Harrelson mentioning how cases sometimes get busted open when the perp talks too much at a bar. Rockwell - despite no longer being employed as a cop at this point and arguably having no formal duty to do so - takes a beating in order to get evidence on this guy. When he finds out it's not the guy he nearly commits suicide. Even Frances who has seen him as a fuck-up genuinely appreciates all that he did, even if it didn't lead to the outcome they hoped for.
Yes, at the end he and Frances drive off to do possibly do something illegal and reckless, but Frances leaves it up in the air as to whether they're actually going to do this. For all we know, they get halfway to their journey and turn back around. What we do know for sure is that the film has spent a half hour having Rockwell's characters do things that - if they were done by someone who started off as neutral - would be hailed as heroic and courageous.
I agree w/ the director that films shouldn't always be clean. It's what was so great about In Bruges, after all. But I summarily reject this idea that anyone who reads a redemptive arc in Rockwell's character somehow watched some entirely different film. While I don't think it was the director's intent and while - again - I don't think Rockwell was redeemed at the end, his actions at least ameliorate someone who has committed despicable acts. And I think it's fair to argue that alone is problematic.
Rockwell's character is rendered as some who is bigoted and stupid, but that also comes from a family where he was arguably not nurtured. He's a loser who lives at home with his mom, who loses arguably the only person who saw some deeper potential with him, and then spends the latter half of the film exhibiting at least some admirable qualities. He picks up on a conversation with someone who anyone would suspect as being the killer - especially after it's set up earlier in the film w/ Harrelson mentioning how cases sometimes get busted open when the perp talks too much at a bar. Rockwell - despite no longer being employed as a cop at this point and arguably having no formal duty to do so - takes a beating in order to get evidence on this guy. When he finds out it's not the guy he nearly commits suicide. Even Frances who has seen him as a fuck-up genuinely appreciates all that he did, even if it didn't lead to the outcome they hoped for.
Yes, at the end he and Frances drive off to do possibly do something illegal and reckless, but Frances leaves it up in the air as to whether they're actually going to do this. For all we know, they get halfway to their journey and turn back around. What we do know for sure is that the film has spent a half hour having Rockwell's characters do things that - if they were done by someone who started off as neutral - would be hailed as heroic and courageous.
I agree w/ the director that films shouldn't always be clean. It's what was so great about In Bruges, after all. But I summarily reject this idea that anyone who reads a redemptive arc in Rockwell's character somehow watched some entirely different film. While I don't think it was the director's intent and while - again - I don't think Rockwell was redeemed at the end, his actions at least ameliorate someone who has committed despicable acts. And I think it's fair to argue that alone is problematic.
Art doesn't exist within a vacuum. Everything about art, from its creation to how we take it in and digest it, is in dialogue with the politics of the time. "Politics" is a broad word, for sure. It can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It can encompass gender politics, class politics, racial politics, etc. A Norman Rockwell piece that was painted and exhibited in 1949 exists, politically, in a different space as it would have if it was painted and exhibited in 2017. The state and shape of the body politic absolutely matters in how art is consumed and digested. It is the filter that exists all around us, operating regardless if we are aware of it or not. To that point, 3BOEM was written 8 years ago; and 8 years may as well be 8 lifetimes ago. In terms of our politics, what is considered acceptable, problematic, or simply important has undergone huge tectonic shifts. 3BOEM was written in a moment of time were Black Lives Matter, systemic police brutality, and fascistic entities assuming power was not commonplace – or at least not to the degree that it exists within the conscious space of 2017. I feel that is a valid criticism of 3BOEM, and I am very disappointed that the director is so willing to dismiss those criticisms as stones thrown by children.
He makes a good point here. We only ever hear about the acts of the racist cops through Mildred and that short scene with Jerome at the beginning of the film. I would have liked to see at least one meaningful black character to actually speak to those ills firsthand rather than through Mildred's off the cuff rants.
I agree with OP the movie does have poor racial politics. This has been discussed at length online so its not 'an absurd hot take'. Don't get me involved in whatever fight's happening here though I won't respond
I don't think he's redeemed necessarily. He doesn't have a redeeming act, just an attempt at not being an idiot. Yet, he's going to do something very risky and possibly idiotic.
He is absolutely not redeemed at all, he actively plans to murder some random guy based on a hunch he can't prove. Plus he's also dragging Mildred into the mess with him.
In the end, I still like the movie. It seems easy to say that the movie is some big "both sides" message, but I also think that's rather dismissive of the context of each character in the movie. Based on the actions of each major character, there isn't a protagonist at all here. And that's fine, you don't need to necessarily root for someone to have enjoy a story.
Mildred may be a mother that's suffering from failing to protect her daughter, but she also uses that as an excuse to manipulate people and physically take out her aggression on them. She is not a good person by any means, and that's fine. Neither is Sam Rockwells character, neither is Woody Harrelsons. Not every story has a hero or a happy ending. And I don't necessarily see that as a fault.
In the end, I still like the movie. It seems easy to say that the movie is some big "both sides" message, but I also think that's rather dismissive of the context of each character in the movie. Based on the actions of each major character, there isn't a protagonist at all here. And that's fine, you don't need to necessarily root for someone to have enjoy a story.
Mildred may be a mother that's suffering from failing to protect her daughter, but she also uses that as an excuse to manipulate people and physically take out her aggression on them. She is not a good person by any means, and that's fine. Neither is Sam Rockwells character, neither is Woody Harrelsons. Not every story has a hero or a happy ending. And I don't necessarily see that as a fault.
I liked it, but nah, Shape of Water was almost too good. It getting anything less than best picture is criminal.
So the film would somehow be better if Rockwell were a cartoon racist who never does anything admirable and is a despicable shitheel until the very last frame?
Star Wars was made for six year olds and even Lucas allowed their villain to have some modicum of redemption.
Star Wars was made for six year olds and even Lucas allowed their villain to have some modicum of redemption.
Good Time and The Florida Project not being nominated for Best Picture is even more criminal.
Thought TSOW was good, not great. Kind fell off the 2nd half.
Sorry to bump this thread. I am very conflicted about this movie. I love his previous films, I love his humour and the dark tone he has in his movies.
Those things I liked in this movie, too. I think overall it is a strong movie, with great perfomances and a story about a grieving mother.
However, I really did not like how this movie tried to make me feel sympathetic towards racist, sexist, homophobic asshole people, especially Rockwell's character. Was this really the directors intention, to put out the word "hey, even the worst of the worst are still humans and should be felt sorry for" ? Because oh boy, that really felt shitty.
Those things I liked in this movie, too. I think overall it is a strong movie, with great perfomances and a story about a grieving mother.
However, I really did not like how this movie tried to make me feel sympathetic towards racist, sexist, homophobic asshole people, especially Rockwell's character. Was this really the directors intention, to put out the word "hey, even the worst of the worst are still humans and should be felt sorry for" ? Because oh boy, that really felt shitty.
In retrospect, A lot of the comments in this thread are embarrassing including my own.
Sorry AuthenticM
Sorry AuthenticM
I just watched this recently too. Some movies, I think, aren't trying to be a morality play. They just show people who are morally grey. Aborrent in some ways, virtuous in others. The film isn't saying that the racist is a good guy, he's just a guy. A POS who has a good side to him, who has the capacity to maybe change. I don't think his arc amounts to redemption. In real life we wrestle with these contradictions all the time.
Another film that does this is Once Upon a Time in America.
Another film that does this is Once Upon a Time in America.
OP
OP
No worries. I'm glad more people are noticing how problematic this movie is.
