The article from New York Times' critic-at-large Wesley Morris is a classic example of feeling the need to say "something" about a movie he feels is undeserving yet award winning. And, fine, everybody gets to like or dislike what they want, I'm not here to say his taste is wrong; what I will say though, is that his qualms and hot-take criticisms seem like he missed the entire point of what the movie was trying to do. Morris frames his take like this:
"What’s got people arguing is whether the movie is convincingly about America (Ebbing is as real a place as Narnia) and whether this movie about America ought to be, say, redeeming one of the racist cops serving and protecting Ebbing. Of course, anybody who loves “Crash” already knows the answer to that one — “Why not!”"
Right here is why I think everything else about Morris' piece just falls flat- he's asking the wrong questions. Three Billboards isn't a movie about America, nor is it trying to be. To say that it is would be say the The Chronicles of Narnia are really about how England should restore itself to theocratic monarchical rule. Three Billboards is set in a small, rural town as a dramatic convenience for everyone to know intimate details about each other, it has no interest in "saying" anything about those towns one way or the other. The other part of this though, falls on what you think "redeemed" means, and whether or not that's actually happening.
Sam Rockwell's Officer Dixon is, quite easily, one of the worst cops in recent films. Hes a violent, racist thug who refuses any personal responsibility or culpability in anything he does, and who follows Woody Harrelson's Chief Willoughby like an approval and attention starved middle child. After he's been (inadvertently) burned by Francis McDormand's Mildred Hayes, he resolves himself to find her daughter Angela's rapist/murderer as a way to live up to the by this point dead Willoughby's expectations of him. He tries to be patient, thorough, and creative in his investigation, and then when it doesn't quite pan out, he ends up driving to Idaho with Mildred to possibly murder his suspect. If that isn't a textbook redemption arc, I don't know what is.
Dixon never confronts the issues that made him terrible, he just briefly tries something different until it doesn't work before he falls back into his old habits. Obviously, that isn't redemption. That he becomes more pitiable over the course of the movie does not mean that he is somehow become "better" or that the story has now moved him into the "good" column. Making a character sympathetic while still being an ignorant bigot is meant to highlight that no matter how badly we may want to, we rarely have the opportunity to feel just one, unconflicted emotion for another person. The idea that if someone isn't constantly being called out for their bigotry that means that prejudice is acceptable is a cultural hang-up borne of our long denial that prejudice even existed and if it did, that it was entirely deserved. That's our problem to solve, not McDonagh's; it's ridiculous to expect his story to resolve our problems and then bitch about the fact that he doesn't even try to.
Given the framing he's working from, you can expect Morris to get smaller moments in the film dead wrong, and he doesn't disappoint. When Dixon has Mildred in an interrogation cell, he reacts to her "How's the nigger torturing business?" taught with an explosive "It's Person-of-Color Torturing business, you can't say nigger anymore." Morris reads this as McDonagh having cheep thrills at having someone say the word nigger and to highlight the absurdity of PC culture. But... it's not. That exchange is there to highlight that Dixon cannot distinguish the important things staring him right in the face. The thing he's most upset about when he's called a professional bigoted sadist is to complain about someone else using a racial slur while doing so; which, again, speaks to his skewed sense of priorities or what constitutes a violation of proper decorum.
Morris also thinks that someone watching Don't Look Now is an attempt to make the people in the film "poetically interesting" instead of just McDonagh engaging in the self-referential nods that he built Seven Psychopaths out of. (For context, In Bruges is a film with some spiritual and textual ties to Don't Look Now.) The weirdest hangup Morris has is that he thinks the movie is going for some kind of sense of pretension by making "Oscar Wilde" Willoughby's last words before he kills himself. Never mind how mentioning one of the most iconic and widely known authors in the English language qualifies as "pretentious," let's deal with the fact the reason Willoughby is saying them is because that was the punchline to joke his wife just told him not five minutes before. You know, the last time he'll ever talk to her, because he's about to kill himself. That Morris can spin a man trying focus on the last thing his wife told him so his last thought will be a happy one into some hamfisted attempt at hoity-toity "auteur" pretension is a testament to how even professional critics can fail so completely when they really want to.
All that aside, the real attempt at a haymaker is this:
"For a movie that asks you to behold so much violence — defenestration and talk of rape, a bludgeoning, a suicide, charred skin, a dental drill that treats a thumb like drywall — “Three Billboards” feels weirdly benign. Its black comedy doesn’t leave a bruise. The violence curdles into the cartoonish. The movie could be about grace and vengeance, but they’re presented as hoary lessons and hokey contrivances — happening upon a deer, sharing your orange juice with the madman who tried to murder you, juxtaposing the reading of an inspirational letter with an inferno. There’s no reckoning with anything, no introspection, just escalating mayhem."I want to focus on the last sentence first, that "there's no reckoning, no introspection, just escalating mayhem." The only thing I can really say to this "Well, duh." The "no reckoning, no introspection" thing is sort of the whole point. Does Morris really think that Mildred would be pulling such a stunt and escalating things at every opportunity if she was willing to be introspective and try to reconcile the grief and anger she has over burying a child against the hatred she has for herself after a moment of anger she can't take back, having her last words to her daughter be "I hope you get raped, too." Mildred's refusal to do so, to only vent her anger by unleashing it on anyone and everyone in her path, is what drives the movie. Surely Morris has seen movies where the plot is driven by the flaw of its main character before, so it's odd that he wouldn't recognize that the flaws are an intentional part of the story and not because McDonagh just forgot those things existed.
What I think is the most telling give away that Morris not only doesn't understand the movie but has no intention of trying to, is his dismissal of the orange juice scene as hoary or hokey. The scene takes place between Dixon and Caleb Landry Jones character Red Welby. Red owns the titular billboards and was thrown out of a window by Dixon after Willoughby shot himself. Dixon is in the hospital after being burned in Mildred's firebombing of the police station and has most of his face wrapped in bandages. Red makes the offer of orange juice to make him feel better before he realizes who he's talking to, but figures it out once he stands over Dixon's bed. At this point, Red naturally starts having a bit of a breakdown being so close to the man who threw him out of a window, but he still decides to pour Dixon a glass of his orange juice, with a straw to boot. It's a small thing, yes, it's one that had Red not done it, no one would've blamed him for doing so. Instead, when given the chance to repay him for the evil that's been done to him, Red chooses not to. He's been viciously attacked, but he chooses to be something other than the anger and pain that resulted in it. To treat a moment like that like it's some hackneyed Very Special Episode climax without a voice over just seems antagonistic.
I could see why someone would find the imagery of Dixon reading Willoughby's posthumous letter to him while the flames creep up to him unnoticed, as a representation of both Dixon's and Mildred's uncompromising passions, it's hardly subtle. But conflating personal distaste with objective flaws is presumptuous as fuck and should only be the realm of IMDB users with a love of all caps and exclamation points. And the deer scene? The movie explicitly subverts the idea that the deer showing up at the billboards is some kind of cosmic sign to be forgiving instead of wrathful; the only way to mistake that scene for the opposite is do so on purpose which, again, is just disingenuous.
Of course, none of this is to say that Three Billboards is a perfect movie and all criticism is invalid, it's just that the primary things people are saying about it are just wrong. It makes no sense to criticize this movie over its ideas about race and police brutality in America because it simply doesn't have or even attempt to have any. The issue of police brutality is only used as a characterization of Dixon early in the movie and as a justification for another character bringing Mildred the backup posters after the originals are burned later on, but that's it. There's no examination or even an interest in using the issue as anything other than plot point, so to criticize the film's message regarding the issue, you have to first invent one. So if someone was to say they were disappointed that McDonagh used these things as a quick and dirty way to establish the town's "Southerness" but nothing else, they'd be right to say so. Morris actually does do this, saying that Ebbing doesn't have any real sense of place or specificity and... yeah, he's right about that. And I think that blandness is intentional, so McDonagh doesn't have to deal with any actual place and it's history of bigotry or brutality. That, too, could be a solid grounds for criticism, that McDonagh treats things as inconvenient distractions to his character drama to be avoided. But that perspective is less favorable to polemics, so it obviously just won't do.
It's always disappointing when bad criticism surrounds any movie but it's even more so when someone's who's supposed to be a professional and actually good at this jump on the bandwagon of inventing messages the movie doesn't actually have to make their own taste seem more impressive than it actually is.
