I’ve seen two of Martin McDonagh’s films: Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The former is an unusual yet highly effective balance between satirical comedy and somber drama—the latter tips the balance, focusing more on drama and less on comedy. As such, Three Billboards is less effective than Seven Psychopaths, though not enough to make it a failure. The film is rich with strong performances, and while its plot drags at times, its characters and occasional comedy gold are enough to keep the story engaging.
Yet there is one aspect that really bothers me. Three Billboards contains an array of complex, morally grey characters each with their own positives and negatives…except for the black characters. There are three notable black characters in Three Billboards, and they are all goodhearted, well-meaning, respectable individuals that do the right thing no matter what (i.e. two of them standing up for the bigoted cop character when he’s getting beat up). In a film about morally complex characters, the only black characters are each their own Sidney Poitier from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: upstanding individuals with no faults (ironically, making them the only morally white characters).
Now in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, there's a good reason Poitier’s character Dr. John Prentice was written as such a pure character. The film was handling a very controversial topic at its time—interracial marriage—and needed to emphasize the idiocy of racism by portraying Prentice as the perfect man no reasonable person could object to. It’s not 1967 anymore, however, and while racism still certainly exists, there’s no good reason here for three separate black characters to all be flawless beings. These aren’t well-written characters, they’re flat and one-dimensional—such as the supportive black best friend whose life seems to revolve around the white protagonist's just to say “You go girl!” I get the feeling McDonagh added these characters in to counterbalance some of his major white characters' bigotry and/or offensive usage of words (i.e. white protagonist says the N-word, but is also best friends with a black character). Yet by writing them as one-dimensional stock supporting characters, McDonagh has ended up being just as offensive.
