Every year, there’s at least one Best Picture contender, critical darling and frontrunner, and faces the slings and arrows of awards season backlash. This year, that mantle belongs to “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” The latest from Martin McDonagh picked up considerable steam on the fall festival circuit, wining the coveted Audience Award at TIFF, which has in recent years become an augur of Oscar success.
However, across the past month or so, the tide has been turning, with many voicing their unease with the picture. In particular, questions have been raised about Oscar nominee Sam Rockwell‘s character, a racist Southern cop who some perceive as getting undeserving sympathetic moral arc. McDonagh has heard those criticisms, and in a new interview with EW, shares his perspective about how his movie treats the character.
“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,” he said.
“It’s supposed to be a deliberately messy and difficult film. Because it’s a messy and difficult world,” McDonagh added. “You have to kind of hold up a mirror to that a little bit and say we don’t have any kind of solution. But I think there’s a lot of hope and humanity in the film and if you look at all those issues with those things in your heart, we might move on to a more interesting place.”
It’s an interesting defence, and I’d agree that Rockwell’s character isn’t entirely forgiven; perhaps the difficulty is that the film asks the audience to step into his shoes. And while McDonagh wants people to like his movie, he does acknowledge that, “We’re trying to do something that’s a bit little more difficult and more thoughtful.” Thus, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
Thoughts? Hit up the comments section.
I enjoyed the movie
The movie was crap even if you remove Sam’s character. What a messy script.
It’s a movie, nobody’s putting a gun to your head at the ticket counter, find some real world issues to protest, there’s no shortage right now.
Painting despicable characters in a sympathetic arc is an age-old storytelling tic, it happens fucking everywhere.
Lastly, it’s an absurd claim that racist types are unable to change their outlook. It’s completely laughable to suggest that a character who is literally set on fire is getting off too easy.
racism is a real world issue and there’s already no shortage of media that bends backwards to be cop propaganda and make them likable. nobody is putting a gun to your head to take time out of your day to defend more of it but here you are
Underscoring the pointlessness of my assertion by paroting it borderlines on incoherence. Martin McDonough is a playwrite. Archetypes and propaganda use some of the same storytelling manipulations. Ireland has a storied history with police, race relations and the church, common themes in his work, just transported to America. I’m simply not for dumbing down dialogue surrounding racism by arguing that depiction/story and reality are beholden to the same set of rules. Buzzwords like propaganda mean little when used to endorse censorship.
Oh forgive me, the big dumdum, for not understanding the literary nuanced genius of the irish playwrite and his brother whose last work was also cop propaganda on the level of a david ayer movie.
“endorse censorship” look out we got another libertarian dork who thinks anything that challenges the status quo is “censorship” while anything putting out views that defend or reinforce it is clean pure “objective” opinions being harmlessly spouted into a contextless void and freedom of speech.
War on Everyone was so terrible, but the Guard was genius.
I don’t favor powerful or entrenched. If you’re attempting to describe McDonough, I’m not plugging meritocracy or even the illusion of it, but he seems to have earned what power he has, though entrenched in Hollywood after 3 poorly performing films is a bit of a stretch. But you seem to like to blow up everything macro, and hurl accusiations and profile complete strangers. Thanks for your grandiose analysis, but I can make little sense of it. Why get so butthurt by a rote literary trope of redemption, it’s so common in so many mediums or are you just always on triggered?
This movie is a case of art imitating life. And life is messy…it’s not always tied up with a pretty bow. I agree with MM the Rockwell character is not fully redeemed and imo neither is the Macdormand character
There’s a thing in this movie that I’m really surprised hardly anyone is talking about online and that’s [SPOILER ALERT… really, look away now if you’ve not seen Three Billboards] the fairly clearly signposted fact that Dixon is gay. And seemingly closet gay. This doesn’t mitigate prejudice but it’s well known that closeted people can sometimes be especially homophobic or disdainful of other minorities, in trying to grapple with or suppress their own identity. It’s terribly sad but terribly real. Isn’t that what Dixon’s doing here? This doesn’t redeem him, but this is a guy whose heart is at odds with who he is on the surface. We can class him as outright evil or we can see a twinkle of hope in him amid the darkness.