A movie about which I have intensely mixed feelings! A lot of these thoughts were formed in conversation with Charles Lehman<\/a>, for which I am grateful.<\/p>\n # Early on, we see a guy reading Flannery O\u2019Connor and so we can guess that this violent story will show us a world somehow mangled, misfired. And my favorite thing about the film is structural: It\u2019s about a series of attempts to get justice which kind of ricochet off their intended targets and end up bringing either justice or mercy (or the hope of justice) to some totally different situation. Human efforts don\u2019t achieve their ends, but that doesn\u2019t make them pointless or ineffective. Their effects are startlingly powerful\u2013they just take place far away from where you\u2019d expect.<\/p>\n # The story starts when grieving mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand doing her gritty thing) buys three billboards on a deserted stretch of rural road. The billboards will go up at Easter (\u201cThat\u2019s perfect\u201d) and they will say, in giant letters against a lurid red background, RAPED WHILE DYING\/AND STILL NO ARRESTS?\/HOW COME, SHERIFF WILLOUGHBY?<\/p>\n Charles called this attempt to get justice for her daughter\u2019s murder an act of \u201ccivil disobedience\u201d and that phrase gets at a big part of what\u2019s going on in the movie. Because what Mildred does is legal\u2013and yet many people in the town treat it as if it\u2019s a crime. She\u2019s harassed and threatened, her friends and allies are arrested and brutally beaten, the public provision of justice has completely broken down.<\/p>\n The one cop who does not treat the billboards as an attack is the sheriff himself (Woody Harrelson). In one of the movie\u2019s many twists, he comes to Mildred and basically admits defeat. He even pays for the billboards to stay up (in a weird mercy-as-punishment twist which I especially loved). They have this conversation where Mildred is like, \u201cPay your debts and do your duty!\u201d, and he says, \u201cI have tried, and I can\u2019t,\u201d and it\u2019s that admission which begins to break up the miles-thick ice of mistrust and contempt in which the whole town is locked.<\/p>\n # On one level this is a movie about<\/em> contempt, which you guys may have noticed is one of my obsessions. Three Billboards<\/em> shows contempt as painfully understandable defense strategy, without ever making it actually defensible.<\/p>\n # Part of how contempt shapes the movie\u2013and I\u2019m wandering, but I\u2019ll get back to the justice thing in a moment\u2013is that we get two characters who are kinda dumb, not sharp or competent, who nonetheless understand things which are close to the movie\u2019s heart. This is a character type I always fall for tbh. One of these characters is Penelope, the young girlfriend of Mildred\u2019s ex-husband. She says something the movie proves to be pretty obviously true, which she got off a bookmark: \u201cViolence begets more violence.\u201d And it\u2019s played for laughs: \u201cPenelope said \u2018begets\u2019?\u201d, one of the film\u2019s great lines. But she says it because she, unlike a lot of people here, is able to recognize its truth.<\/p>\n The other character of this type is the hapless dumb racist thug cop (Sam Rockwell, mostly selling a hard character to sell) whose story is as central to the film as Mildred\u2019s. He\u2019s a guy for whom contempt might even be justified if contempt could ever be justified. He\u2019s the thug as schlemiel: dominated by his crass mom, hopeless in an alcoholic way which I recognized, willing to suffer intensely<\/em> to transform his life and bring justice as soon as somebody in authority tells him he\u2019s capable of change. He suffers quite a bit of redemptive violence and is the object of more than one of the movie\u2019s acts of forgiveness.<\/p>\n # Okay, here we get into the problems. Three Billboards<\/em> has all kinds of weird glitches and one huge misstep. There are things which just seem out of place\u2013the scene with the priest is weird, even though it does work to show the festering anger, judgment, and contempt which shape the town. There are tone shifts which undercut the movie\u2019s characterization\u2013the first time the thug cop talks about \u201cpeople-of-color torturing\u201d it seems to be a savage bit of semi-self-aware gallows humor, which I do in fact buy from this slow junkyard dog of a man, but then later it seems like he seriously thinks the problem with his brutality was his language? There are moments when he\u2019s dumb in a cartoon way that goes for the cheap laugh over the painful laugh.<\/p>\n Or take the reason for Mildred Hayes\u2019s furious grief. She feels guilty about her daughter\u2019s horrifying death\u2013of course she does, that\u2019s how anyone would feel. But the film doesn\u2019t trust us to accept that anybody would feel that way. The movie has her feel guilty because she literally, exactly in these words told her daughter to go walk in that field and get raped and murdered, and then she did!!!!!<\/em>, and it\u2019s just all so on-the-nose and unnecessary. It\u2019s chintzy.<\/p>\n # The huge, sad and sordid problem with the movie is that racism and black people are ciphers in an alphabet used to talk solely about the sins and redemptions of white people. Racism is a theme the movie insists on grappling with but it just cannot do it well, because the black characters aren\u2019t people. They are plot furniture who might as well blink out of existence as soon as they\u2019ve performed their role in the moral drama of the white folk.<\/p>\n Matt Zoller Seitz summarized<\/a> some of what\u2019s going on here on twitter: \u201cFrom responses I can see that there\u2019s a major split between people who think this movie is a political, sociological failure and those who think it\u2019s a success in theological\/karmic ones.\u201d And you guys know already that I would add that the political failure to use racism as more than a macguffin is also a theological failure. Anyway, Seitz\u2019s whole thread<\/a> is worth reading.<\/p>\n # The ending acts like an unresolved ending, one of those things where the filmmakers aren\u2019t willing to commit and pick a side, which I a million percent hate. But Charles argued, and I think this is right, that the ending does take a stand: in favor of private deliberation, a private search for justice rather than a public monopoly on it. The characters\u2019 uncertainty (he said, & I agree) is \u201ca feature of the actual pursuit of justice (the distance b\/t human justice and capital-J Justice, if you\u2019re feeling platonist).\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout the film we see that private and public\/official justice are separate processes which nonetheless interpenetrate\u2013the boundaries between public and private are porous. People want and need public justice, in part because public justice says that your life has value even if nobody else recognizes it\u2013even if you don\u2019t have an avenging mother to take up your cause. Three Billboards<\/em> is a movie about two different kinds of failure of public justice: the normal human failure where we can\u2019t accomplish what we need to do, and the sinful failure where we don\u2019t even try to acknowledge and fulfill our duties. The attempt to rectify the first failure provokes instead a rectification of the second.<\/p>\n # There\u2019s a suicide-note scene which so perfectly replicates actual arguments actual suicidal people make in their heads that my gut reaction is that it\u2019s evil and shouldn\u2019t have been filmed. Charles pointed out that I tend to be unusually sensitive to suicide scenes (as I\u2019m unusually numb to violence and sexual perversity) and I realize that there\u2019s a later, quite powerful scene in which the movie shows<\/em> you that these justifications for suicide are false. I basically don\u2019t ever want to be in a theater hearing heroic lies about how suicide is \u201cbravery.\u201d (The note\u2019s author means that it\u2019s charity, but Americans don\u2019t talk about charity so he uses this much less girly word.) But maybe to most audiences the suicide scene plays as so horrifying that you already get that the justifications for it are awful even from within the note\u2019s own premises.<\/p>\n # The music is fantastic. The look of it is great, although I do feel like somebody got an idea in his head that he wanted to see tough, chewed-up Frances McDormand in a jumpsuit so we get a whole lot of that.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A movie about which I have intensely mixed feelings! A lot of these thoughts were formed in conversation with Charles Lehman, for which I am grateful. # Early on, we see a guy reading Flannery O\u2019Connor and so we can guess that this violent story will show us a world somehow mangled, misfired. And my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[171,38,470,18,1313],"class_list":["post-10977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-abuse-of-power-comes-as-no-surprise","tag-forgiveness","tag-order-is-chaos","tag-race","tag-redemption-through-violence"],"yoast_head":"\n