POLL 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' Is...

a guy who would literally leave his hooded, shot body for his family to find

For me this was one of the more extraordinary and hard to deal with parts of the film. But wait, maybe it's a clue... the cop who's painted as a decent family man just trying his hardest against impossible odds is in fact a complete asshole with terrible judgment, so the letter he writes to Rockwell is totally misguided and bogus, giving the lie to any idea of Rockwell's redemption. mindblown.gif

There's also his apparently casual disinterest in taking seriously/doing his job, apparent failure to fire or even punish an officer we're repeatedly told has engaged in racist brutality (that, I think intentionally, we never actually see, though we certainly see evidence of him being incredibly violent, which does get him fired basically on the spot by Harrelson's apparently-more-serious replacement, and at least joking about his own/the department's apparently widespread reputation for racism), and at least expressed (disinterest in the wellbeing of wide classes of the citizenry but) willingness to seek to punish people for personal reasons, among other abuses I may be forgetting or that one could imagine (I have no dog in the suicide, which doesn't particularly signify as immoral to me). But maybe I'm missing some basis for deeming him saintly (a term that like redemption doesn't have significant presence in my vocabulary or cosmology as a non-Christian).

All of us in the audience know that these things make Harrelson horrible but it is really really not clear that McDonagh thinks so. The character is "saintly" in an almost literal sense - his chief characteristic is taking suffering onto himself and turning the other cheek. Despite all the lapses we might observe in his professional conduct, personally he takes the billboards in remarkable stride (the film basically thinks McDormand is wrong to blame Chief Woody but that with his dying-man's perspective, he recognizes that this is something she emotionally needs to do and he doesn't really GAF at this point). We get the tender scene of him taking the family out on one last day trip, he's clearly marked as a Good Dad, and then his first letter (to his wife) is the most writerly and decent and speaking-to-goodness thing in the film (even if we're scratching our heads about the logic of them finding his corpse etc.). His letter to McDormand is almost as big a neon sign for him being A Good Guy if I remember right, so clearly we're being set up to accept the letter to Rockwell as a similar gift of goodness from beyond the grave, rather than the reprehensible hand-waving of police brutality it actually is.

Ok, I accept that, but read the film and therefore director differently.

He's an emblem of "defend the people you know in the name of community" Vs "defend behavioural standards in the name of justice"

The movie clearly approves of this. Were Rockwell's character actually defensible or were his redemption a lot less easy and trite it could be interesting

But they aren't and it isn't

The most interesting thing about the movie is how we are pretty well set up to both sympathise and disapprove of McDormand's character's cold inflexibility but allowing it to turn into the brutalist cop's redemption arc is a waste of all that

One ridiculous moment i don't think has been mentioned yet is the flashback that established that the night her daughter got raped and killed McDormand had an argument with her, refused to pay for her taxi so she had to walk out into the night, and her last words to her daughter were "I hope you get raped". Maybe McDonagh thought this was a Jamesian turn of the screw, it felt more like a Cleesian slap with a fish.

Jesus attacking the man's subtlety seems a but much

hahahahah yes that was so over the top and unnecessary i started cackling

i thought this movie was very funny in its absurdity

Yes

i mean, throwing dude out of the window? setting fire to the police station? the indefensible method of suicide? hilarious. im not being sarcastic, the movie is like an episode of South Park.

this is another reason why the invocations of race and policing in america, and sexual violence generally (all things that normal humans justifiably take seriously) is so disastrous - if this was just a tale of absurd violence spiralling out of control in some small town, as playwrighty conversations wind around them, it'd be viable as a dark comedy that probes some weightier themes of grief and the morality of revenge and vigilanteism. basically "in bruges" again.

is -> are

that "i hope you get raped too" scene was the most hilariously on the nose scene i've seen in years

i was not exactly feeling the movie before it, but that was the scene that made me think, "THIS? THIS IS THE MOVIE YOU RAVED ABOUT?"