Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri: Redemption is not Assured

I couldn't imagine, as I sat watching "Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri", that I was the only person for whom the name "Flannery O'Connor" came to mind. She is another one of my favorite thinkers.  I am certain I have written sometime in these pages. I can't say she was one of my favorite writers. Her short stories, particularly "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" wherein an entire Southern family, elder and child, is shot to death by an escaped convict, whose life without any moral compass motivates a life of pure "meanness", are hard to take. Always, in O'Connor's tales, hidden within the grotesque, is the possibility, with Grace bestowed, of Redemption, accepted, or refused. There is the potentiality of good in all of us, however lost, or as Catholicism puts it, "we incline toward the good" but still do evil if we do not actively choose or embrace the good.

I have read the letters of Ms. O'Connor, compiled in a book called "The Habit of Being" and read more than one biography of her.  I consider her something of a modern saint, but her writing always disturbed me to avoidance. I read a few of her stories.  I read about all of them. It was, no doubt, one of her goals to disturb, which after all, is a reality of life from which we cannot escape and which provides the soil in which we either select the light, or the darkness.

When the unsettling (disturbing) movie concluded, I immediately googled to see what connection had been made to Ms. O'Connor, her writing, and her themes by critics. There were many. And it turns out the connection even flashed on the screen, though I was not sufficiently observant. One of the main characters is reading O'Connor shortly after the movie begins.  One review was fixated on the backlash against the movie because the Sam Rockwell character, who plays a rather stupid, drunken (and mean, if it comes to that) cop, is a racist and is effectively "redeemed" without any real contrition or act demonstrating it. For my part, I think that complaint misses the point. The guy is an equal opportunity hater. And whether he, or anyone in the movie, actually achieves redemption, is the open question at the end of the movie. Let me back up and give you the story.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, THEN DON'T READ ON, FOR THERE ARE SPOILERS.

A mother has lost her teen-aged daughter to a particularly vicious crime. Angela was raped, murdered, and set on fire until fully charred. The family is Tennessee William's decrepitude. They routinely yell vile curses at each other over the breakfast and dinner table. It is during one of the cursing matches that the daughter asks for, and is denied, the family car.  She stomps out saying she'll walk to town, and hopes she will be raped.  Her mother's last words to her are the same--she hopes her daughter is raped, too. She doesn't mean it, of course. The precise profound evil has occurred when the movie begins. Mildred, the mother, is in angry pain, the presenting anger being that the police haven't solved the crime after many months. They don't, from her point of view, seem particularly motivated to do so. The Chief of Police (Willoughby) is an upper middle aged guy, with a young wife, and two young daughters. She gets the idea if she can publicize the failure, maybe something will get done. So she rents three broken down, and unused (since 1986) billboards leading to her house, paying the first month of five thousand dollars by selling off her ex-husband's tractors, boldly asking why the Chief hasn't solved the murder. The town isn't particularly happy with Mildred, as the Chief tries to tell her that he has done all he could and that the DNA matches to no one in the criminal system, and that it appears to have been done by someone passing through town.  More than that, though she knows that the Chief is dying of pancreatic cancer. Her prodding him to solve the murder seem profoundly unfair. When he shoots himself, not because of Mildred's complaint about lack of action, but because he doesn't want his young wife and young children watch him die slowly, Mildred's persistence is nonetheless blamed.  Her anger remains steady, no matter whom it hurts, and it is certainly hurting her remaining child, Robbie, a teenage boy, as well as her domestic abusing ex-husband who has solved his pain by running off with an airhead 19 year old. It is he, not Dixon, the nasty cop, as one would suppose, who ultimately sets fire to the billboards, unable to bear the pain of being reminded of his daughter's death and wanting to move on. As it happens though, there are spares of the posters, and Mildred replaces them on the burnt damaged billboard.

Dixon, played by Rockwell, is incensed from the start and embarks on a program of bullying, physically, and otherwise, to get the billboards removed--which includes throwing the young guy who works for the billboard company (Red) out of a window, after beating him, first. Beating people is his go to thing, and, once again, before the events of this movie, he beat a black man--with apparently no consequence to Dixon. The consequence for beating the young guy, who happens to be white, meted out by the new black Chief, is to lose his job.

Willoughby, though, in one of his penultimate acts before shooting himself in the head, is to write three notes, one to his wife, explaining his reasons for suicide, assuming that she could not possibly bear his last months had he not so acted, one to Mildred to say that he did care about her daughter's death, that his act had nothing to do with her, though, rather cruel tongue in cheek from the grave, he tells her he knows that people will think so, and one to Dixon, telling him that he is a good man (shades of a "Good Man is Hard to Find" again") and could be a good cop. While Dixon is surreptiously reading the letter in the police station (for which he still has a key) late at night, Mildred throws several mazeltov cocktails, thinking that no one is inside. Touched by the letter that Willoughby wrote, Dixon manages to grab the file on the murder of Mildred's daughter and jumps through the flames to the street. Mildred isn't caught because the guy who puts out the flames on Dixon, a dwarf (played by Peter Dinklage) who has always fancied the ever sour Mildred, covers for her.  Mildred is only grateful enough to go out to dinner with her alibi, but without a modicum of charm or kindness toward him.

Dixon, scarred by his burns, but otherwise more or less physically intact, drunkenly overhears a customer passing through Ebbing at the local watering hole bragging about raping someone. Rather than just report the man and his license plate (Idaho) he picks a fight and with the DNA evidence all over his bloodied face and nails, he brings it to the new Chief. Also, foolishly, he tells Mildred of his suspicion. He is apparently trying to reform. But the DNA of the stranger is also not in any criminal database, and he was out of the country (a military man) when Mildred's daughter was murdered.

Nothing has changed. Dixon's reform is a jagged line without a period. Mildred is disappointed and still in her so far unending rage. He calls Mildred while he holds a large shotgun in his hands. He suggests a trip to Idaho where the legally exonerated suspect lives. Mildred picks up the cue by saying that she was planning to go to Idaho "in the morning."

So, they pack up for a road trip. Along with the munchies, Dixon's shotgun gets thrown into the back of  Mildred's station wagon. They speak no words for a long time. Then they justify that in Idaho lives a man who did rape someone, even if it wasn't Mildred's daughter. They wonder if they will really do it. They aren't sure. They'll decide when they get there. The movie ends. There is another opportunity for redemption. But given the history of these people, it is not assured.

I usually don't like movies of this sort, particularly with the violence and profanity. Though there were some questionable plot point explanations (see it, you'll see them; it's not my focus here) the writing was great; the acting great. I could believe these people exist, and their struggles are like my struggles, even though I live is balmy, sophisticated Los Angeles, and not in the decadent, still politically incorrect South (my guess is people are just as politically incorrect here, but more careful). What I mean is that every day I face decisions, small mostly, but occasionally, large, in which I could lose my soul. And so much bombards us while we make those decisions, external and internal. When Grace does present itself, seeing the opportunity and keeping my soul, is not any more assured for me than it was for the characters in this thought-provoking movie.