The backlash against THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MO may have cost it the Best Picture Oscar. It’s hard to judge such things. It didn’t cost the film a couple of well-deserved acting nods, but it didn’t help.
The one thing I want to tell folks who have read the film spectacularly wrong is that it’s not about a racist cop who gets a redemption arc.
He does not.
He honestly does not.
The screenplay actually takes pains to deny us that redemption arc.
Look, the whole movie is about unresolved rage, right? The grieving mother, the brutal deputy. Both are angry the whole film and both do horrible things because of it.
The deputy is a piece of shit. Honestly. He’s an ignorant, stupid bully. We are told that he has been the source of a couple of racial incidents that have embarrassed the department. And just before he gets fired by the new black police chief — a dignified and principled man, there to clean up the joint; remember that? — he goes across the street in a fit of rage and trashes the local advertising agency that has rented McDormand’s character the three billboards, a rampage that culminates in him throwing the guy who runs the place — a sympathetic character — out a second story window.
So when he overhears the conversation that MIGHT be a confession from the rapist-murderer and goes to extreme self-punishing lengths to obtain the bastard’s DNA, that is a rather extreme demonstration that he might not be a totally unredeemable piece of shit.
But then what happens?
Brilliantly, it turns out that the solution to the mystery has not fallen in his lap after all.
The suspect turns out to be not his man.
The crime is not solved.
He does not get his job back.
The black police chief tells him that he has done a brave thing, but does not hand back his badge and say, “I was wrong, maybe we can make a good cop of you yet.”
Easy redemption is denied.
At the end of the film, when the deputy and grieving mother form a partnership and commence a road trip that might end in the vigilante murder of a man they merely suspect of rape, they both say that they’re not sure whether this is the right thing to do, or what they’re going to do when they reach their destination.
People mistake this as his redemption arc, but honestly, it is not. Arcs are completed. An arc would be him making a neat speech to the effect that racism is bad, making restitution, and maybe volunteering to trim hedges at the local black church. Instead, what we get at the end is something that is inherently more challenging to dramatize: the change in direction. Two people are going to do something. They just don’t know what. There is no pretty bow on it. Nobody says that his actions up to this point, or even McDormand’s, are all right. Nobody even says that what they’re about to do is all right. Only that they’ll figure it out when they get there.
Which is a pretty good summary of life.
What’s that? He’s an unworthy character to even receive a hint at redemption? Racist, brutal cops are beyond redemption?
I sure see where you’re coming from.
Except that we have movies about hit men who become better people, criminals and other rotten cads who become better people, and sometimes these dramatic epiphanies are fed to us in a couple of quick vignettes, and it’s over.
We have movies about terrible parents who hug their kids once by the end of the film and thus signal that all personal growth is completed.
Terrible people inching toward enlightenment is a staple of drama, and always has been.
It’s cheap when the enlightenment comes too easily, when the text lets them off the hook too easily.
Sometimes, it’s just the change of direction that makes it a story.
The last letter that deputy receives from the dead sheriff he idolized tells him that he could be a better person. Could be. Isn’t.
He doesn’t get a redemption arc. He gets a moment that might be the launch of a redemption arc, one that might also be a terrible mistake. There’s even dialogue to the effect that we don’t know yet.
By no stretch of the imagination does the movie take the position that he is now a good man, or that his previous sins were just wacky missteps, or that the new boss should have forgiven him and given him his badge back.
You could only think so if your understanding is binary, that the second this guy shows a little self-knowledge, he suddenly starts wearing a white hat.
That is not the case, and the film did not invite such an interpretation.
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