R-E-S-P-E-C-T

 When Dr. King said we had to learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish like fools, he was speaking to the America of the Jim Crow era. This year marks a half a century since his assassination and, doesn’t it just feel like we’re going down that road of fools?! This utter lack of respect for one’s fellow citizen is really the unintended theme of the movie Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, written and directed by Martin McDonagh. It is hard to find a movie more filled with derision for every marginalized group in America: women, black people, gay people, people with dwarfism. Many might have passed on the movie had McDonagh’s film not  received a Best Picture and 6 other Academy Award nominations and already won the Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Cast Ensemble award, among others. This is a travesty and a sign of the times.

Martin McDonagh has brought foul-mouthed, ugly-souled bigots to the screen before in dark comedies like In Bruges or Seven Psychopaths (and this director must have something against short stature people, because he derides them in In Bruges as well). The lead characters in those movies, however, were extremely violent mob criminals (Bruges) or, well, psychopaths! In Three Billboards, the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and just plain detestable people are the everyday folk of a small rural town in America: the mother of a young woman who was raped, the father, the police officers, the dentist, the high school kids, you name it. Was there a message here from this white Englishman?

The basic plot of the film has been all over the internet. Frances McDormand, who plays Mildred the mother of a young woman brutally raped, killed and whose body was burned, decides she can’t wait for the local police to take any more time finding her daughter’s killers and puts up three billboards to try to light a fire under the police chief, played by Woody Harrelson, and his incredibly incompetent police officers, including one Officer Dixon, a violent, distasteful, hate filled bigot and fool, played by Sam Rockwell. McDormand and Rockwell have already won Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards for their roles, which are the central ones in the story.

 

Sam Rockwell as Officer Jason Dixon and Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes 

Mildred and Dixon spend most of the movie showing us just how heartless and cruel people can be or become. The disturbing thing is that these two characters are not the “bad guys” of the film. It would be nothing new to have people shown as ruthless, but the director here is actually going for us to feel sympathy for Mildred and forgiveness for Dixon, who McDonagh makes go through some weird form of redemption in the film.

Mildred, in her “quest for justice” (we suppose this is what the billboards represent) is completely detached and unfeeling towards her much suffering son, disparages the family-loving chief of police who is dying of cancer, insults and harms the dentist (a fat man; fat people are also mocked and ridiculed by McDonagh in In Bruges), compares the Catholic church to a criminal street gang –and all its priests are either pedophiles or pedophile enablers- recklessly damages the town, and foul-mouths just about everyone else in the movie. How to feel sympathy for such a woman? You may think her ruthlessness is a result of her daughter’s brutal murder, but in the only scene where we see her with her daughter still alive, one where they are arguing over a ride to a date, Mildred responds to her daughter’s “I hope I get raped” with a “I hope you get raped too!” Such a detestable line between a mother and her daughter could only have been written into a screenplay by a man. 

That piece of dialogue isn’t even the worst in the film, as bad as it is.  I need to transcribe part of the one that is, and I note that I am not, of course, transcribing the N word, but these white characters certainly did use it in the movie:

MILDRED:  So how’s it all going in the N*****- torturing business, Dixon?

DIXON: It’s ‘Persons of color’-torturing business, these days, if you want to know. (…)

DIXON (to the Chief of Police): She said ‘N*****-torturing’. I said you can’t say ‘N*****-torturing’ no more. You gotta say ‘Persons-of-color’ torturing. Right?

Was this supposed to be one of the “darkly hilarious” scenes, as some critics have found the film to be?! Remember, it’s not the slave master using the N word in a movie that takes place in the 19^th century, it’s the modern day “suffering” mother, the one for whom we’re supposed to feel sympathy, talking to two police officers.

I guess McDonagh is one of those people of our degraded times that embraces living in a “post politically-correct” era.  Mildred’s son –the nice, suffering young man in the movie- calling his mother and sister “c**ts” is probably just him using “locker room talk” to this director. The one Latino in the film is called a “beaner”. The black actors in the movie are like props, none of their characters are developed. The great actor Peter Dinklage, of Game of Thrones fame, plays a character whose only purpose in the movie is to be the butt of the “midget” jokes. Hard to understand why he would accept this role.

 

Frances McDormand as Mildren and Peter Dinkglage as James

People in the theater laughed in some of these openly racist, misogynistic and just plain distasteful scenes. It is the sign of the times. When the current occupant of the White House is the first to disrespect people, referring to all the nations in the African continent as “s***holes”, calling citizens of Mexico “rapists”, saying of women he’d “grab them by the p****”, publicly mocking people with disabilities, disrespecting Native Americans, banning Muslims, and more, how to be surprised by this film director or the many awards his film is accruing? Too many Americans actually say they like how the President “speaks his mind.” What they are saying is that they agree with the racist, misogynist and hate-filled content and they want to “speak their minds” like this as well. McDonagh has spoken his in this screenplay and film.

One message to them: Respect!  Or perish like fools.