Unlike “La La Land,” ″Three Billboards” was meant to agitate.Īctor Clarke Peters said he’s not surprised it has inspired zealous responses. “Three Billboards” co-producer Graham Broadbent even suggested that there is “a degree of success” in the fact that the film has triggered passionate reactions, good and bad. “I think some of it comes from the idea that Sam’s character is redeemed at the end.I don’t think he is,” McDonagh said in a January podcast interview with Variety’s Kristopher Tapley. McDonagh, for his part, disagreed with some of the fundamentals of the backlash. It also became a relative commercial success, with over $121.5 million in box office receipts worldwide.
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“It attracts the type of crowd that likes to reward simplistic tales of racism like ‘Crash,’ where white people learn how to be good to one another at the expense of black people,” Madison wrote.Īfter it won the Golden Globe in January, Wesley Morris wrote in the New York Times that, “It’s like a set of postcards from a Martian lured to America by a cable news ticker and by rumors of how easily flattered and provoked we are.” Morris wondered whether the film really did have anything to say about America.įive days after the Times essay ran, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Ira Madison III writing for The Daily Beast said it was “tone-deaf” and “wholly offensive.” “It’s a barn burner, a bracing shot of whiskey downed while spoiling for a fight, a cathartic wail against the zeitgeist of rape culture and state brutality,” wrote critic Katie Walsh.īut by mid-December a different narrative started taking hold - that the film problematically redeems Rockwell’s racist character. When it hit theaters in November, a month after The New York Times and The New Yorker first wrote about Harvey Weinstein, it also became emblematic of the post-Weinstein rage rippling through society. With its dark humor and complicated characters and themes - a mother out to avenge her daughter’s rape and murder, a suggestion of police brutality against black residents - “Three Billboards” made an early splash with critics and audiences at the Venice Film Festival in September and then at the Toronto International Film Festival in October, where it won the audience award and was hailed by some as one of the year’s best.