Blindspotting (2018)
Dir. Carlos López Estrada
Written by Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal
Starring Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar
Collin (Daveed Diggs,
VELVET BUZZSAW) is a easy-going guy with a lot of problems in his life. First,
he’s a working-class black man in a very rapidly gentrifying Oakland, CA,
watching much of the city he knew and grew up in slipping away into an uncertain
future which may or may not hold a place for him. Second, he’s on his last
three days of a strict, lengthy probation (the result of an earlier conviction
for a not-immediately-specified felony), and any slip-up could send him back to
jail for years. Third, his best friend is Miles (Rafael Casal, the upcoming BAD
EDUCATION), a white guy who grew up with him but whose reckless behavior and
overriding concern for his tough guy rep is constantly threatening to drag
Collin into exactly the kind of trouble he needs to avoid right now. And to
make matters worse, he just witnessed a cop shooting an unarmed black man in
the back. And the cop is played by Ethan Embry (EMPIRE RECORDS), so we strongly
suspect that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of this guy.
That all sounds pretty bleak, and, of course, it is pretty
bleak. But that’s not the whole story here. BLINDSPOTTING is a movie with a lot
of issues on its mind, but it’s also a movie which, like its characters, is
mostly more interested in living than preaching. It’s much more of a hangout
buddy comedy than a social polemic; it just happens to be about a pair of
buddies who can’t extricate their lives from the tumultuous and frequently
hostile social upheaval going on around them. Still, for a movie so obviously ripped
from the headlines in an increasingly angry and polarized society, it’s almost
shockingly low-key, funny, and big-hearted. That alone would be something of a
minor miracle; the fact that it maintains that tone consistently and
successfully without ceding an inch of its moral indignation is something close
to outlandish. If it doesn’t quite stick the landing, it comes about as close
as any movie I’ve seen in years to detailing and exploring the injustices
--primarily but not exclusively the racial injustices-- of modern American
urban life, without dissolving into pedantic lecturing.
Its secret, I think, is its genuine authenticity; Diggs
and Casal really were childhood best friends growing up in Oakland, and
the film was shot there on-location. If the story isn’t explicitly
autobiographical, it’s certainly based on the kind of affectionate, comfortable
familiarity with a place and its people that generally only comes with some
real lived experience. One gets the strong feeling that the writers personally
know the characters they’re portraying here, that the fiction arises naturally
from a lived reality they’ve seen inside and out. And this kind of intimate
understanding allows the film to be surprisingly generous with its characters,
even at their worst. And it’s not shy about showing them at their worst,
either; it doesn’t allow its affection for them to cloud its vision, it just
equally understands that seeing people clearly also means seeing beyond their
worst moments. Seeing the worst in people is the easy part, and that’s as far
as most people get. But true understanding means being able to see something
more complex, both in a person and in a society. It means being able to
identify your own, --oh, hey, the title!-- blind spots.
BLINDSPOTTING sets itself the task of doing just this,
within the microcosm of shifting identity in an Oakland that is very rapidly
ceasing to be what it has been and becoming something altogether different. Of
course, what it was and what it’s becoming, and what either of
those things mean, are by no means a matter of widespread agreement; even
Collin and Miles have different perspectives and approaches. And well they
should, because just as the culture around them is in flux, they, too are still
in the process of shaping themselves and the face they present to the world.
For Collin, his awareness of the fear and suspicion society places on young
black men --especially convicted felons-- is ever-present, and places him in
the position of constantly having to prove his harmlessness (his probation
officer [Kevin Carroll, the Leftovers] tell him as much directly). But
the quickly shifting culture around him might actually offer an opportunity for
just the kind of personal growth he’s attempting; if he can learn to get on-board
with vegan burgers and $10 bodega juice, maybe there’s a place for him here,
after all. For his buddy Miles, on the other hand, the recent changes are
a disaster: the influx of white hipsters into the area means that he’s in
danger of being mistaken for a recent transplant, shattering his self-image as
a white guy who has fought hard to be accepted in a culture which is now
vanishing around him. They have, of course, essentially the same problem;
people are drawing the wrong conclusions about them based on lazy stereotypes.
But the difference is that for Collin, this misunderstanding could turn fatal,
as the shooting he witnessed drives home. And Miles doesn’t quite seem to
understand the danger he’s putting his buddy in with his aggressive, overcompensating
attempts to prove he’s legit.
It would be easy to see Miles as the bad guy here; his
selfish fixation on defending his rep is putting Collin in real jeopardy, and
moreover, we later learn that he was just as involved in the crime that Collin
went to jail for, and yet seems to have avoided taking the rap. He’s the very
embodiment of white privilege, even if that doesn’t in this case equate
to a life which seems very privileged overall. And yet, to its eternal credit,
the movie doesn’t hate him. Despite what a handful he is, we also see why Miles
is charming and fun, and why Collin needs him -- why they need each other. But
they are going in opposite directions at the moment, and headed for a reckoning
one way or another. For a while it seems like the moral of the story might be
that Collin needs to dump his buddy if he wants to grow up, and that’s
certainly the opinion of the character who seems like she’s being set up to be
the moral center of the movie --Collin’s ex, Val (Janina Gavankar, The
League, True Blood)-- who disapproves of Miles and thinks Collin would be
better off without him. But the movie disagrees. (SPOILERS) At the end of the
day, she has a blind spot too: she’ll never be able to see past Collin’s
assault conviction. But Miles will. He’s a moron, and deserves the
dressing-down he gets from Collin over what a selfish asshole he’s been, but in
the end he sheepishly grows a little, they remain friends, and the movie is openly
glad for it. Me too. (END SPOILERS)
The movie’s friendly refusal to paint anyone as a clear
villain extends even beyond Miles; it would be easy to make fun of fussy
photographer Patrick (Wayne Knight (!) JURASSIC PARK), but the movie affords
him a certain bemused dignity (and hey, he’s also being displaced out of
the neighborhood where he could once afford to be an eccentric artist).
Likewise, it could resent unlicensed gun dealer / uber driver Dezz (Jon
Chaffin, The Haves and Have Nots) for wholeheartedly playing into the
stereotypes Collin is desperate to get away from; instead, it sees him as a
beloved local institution, the kind of larger-than-life character who gives the
city its unique flavor. Even the much-derided gentrifying hipsters we encounter
turn out to be very friendly and inviting, just like the $10 “green juice” that
has turned up at their local bodega turns out to be pretty tasty, once you get
used to it. It doesn’t mean they’re not causing problems, of course, but
they’re trying, in their own way, to be neighborly. They just have, you know,
some blind spots.
(SPOILERS FOR THIS WHOLE PARAGRAPH) Most
surprising of all, even the inevitable final confrontation with the killer cop
refuses to allow him to be a clear-cut villain. If there’s anyone who should be
the heel of this story, it would have to be this character, the focal
point of all the unfair pressure that’s been bearing down on Collin. And yet,
when we finally meet him, he’s more of a pathetic figure than a threatening
one; we meet him in his house, weeping inconsolably. He, too, is moving out of
the area. Possibly he and his family are no longer safe here now that he’s
known for, you know, murdering a guy, but is it too much to wonder if his cop
salary doesn’t go as far as it used to in Oakland? He may be the victim of the
same forces pushing Collin and his friends out of their home. Maybe they should
be on the same side. But of course they’re not, and Collin gets to give him a
piece of his mind. You might think, especially knowing what we know about him,
that this cop would respond with defensiveness equal to Collin’s fury, but he doesn’t;
instead, he just offers a wheedling plea that he “didn’t mean to.” In a way,
that puts him in the same boat as Collin and Miles; people look at him and see
a killer, but he doesn’t see himself that way, doesn’t want that label. He’s
got a nice wife and a cute little kid, probably has a grill out back and an
apron with some dorky dad joke written on it. That’s who he thinks he is, he
doesn’t think of himself as the face of systemic ethno-cultural oppression. But unlike
Collin or Miles, he’s gotten to this point not because of what he looks like,
but because of the choices he’s made. He may not think of himself as a racist
or a hateful guy or a fascist oppressor, certainly didn’t wake up that morning
planning to kill an unarmed black man. But he didn’t have to pull that trigger
in that moment, and when the time came, he chose to do it. Which makes Miles' reply to his doleful plea that he “didn’t mean to” just about perfect: “you
sure?” (END SPOILERS)
It’s an interesting
ending, and maybe an inescapable one, but it’s also the one part of the movie
where its righteous indignation might get the better of it and push it to the
parochial sermonizing that it has up to that point managed entirely to
sidestep. It’s raw and explosive enough that it works emotionally, even if it
doesn’t quite work narratively, and it has the benefit of a cathartic rush,
amplified by the dreamlike strangeness of being the one scene in the movie
which seems utterly divorced from the down-to-earth realism of everything
that’s come before. It’s a crazy, ballsy thing to suddenly pull on an
audience, and it has the overwhelming feeling of something Diggs and Casal just
had to say aloud, had to get out there, narrative logic be
damned. And it almost comes close to working, which is an impressive
achievement all by itself. Earnestness and urgency get you a long way, but
ultimately there’s no way around the fact that it also smashes the movie’s
structure by adding a second climax which it just doesn’t need. The heart of
the movie is the relationship between Collin and Miles, and that plot has
already reached its perfect conclusion; adding an abbreviated final act
afterwords disrupts the quiet momentum that’s steadily been building --mostly
unseen by deeply felt-- for the entire runtime, just to directly spell out
everything the movie has already demonstrated far more powerfully and
intractably. It’s understandable that two first-time writers --and especially
two rappers-- would ultimately prefer to put their feelings into words, but I
hope the next time around they trust that the nature of cinema is always that
it is better to show than tell. And the movie is so good at
showing that it’s a shame to retreat to telling right at the finish line. It
ends up feeling like a rare moment of insecurity in a movie which is overall
almost preternaturally sure-footed.
Still, it’s a moment only, and not even a wholly bad moment, just a somewhat destabilizing one. And it’s the one off-note in a stunningly ambitious melody which is certainly not lacking in notes. Much of this seems like it absolutely should never work. Mixing broad jokes with fervid social commentary, mixing grounded realism with strange flights of fancy, mixing a buddy hangout movie with the gut-wrenching tension of Collin’s precarious place in light. But somehow it all does, and I guess that’s mostly the result of how emotionally authentic it feels, and how well it captures the vibrant life of a particular time and place (director Carlos López Estrada, a music video guy, has a real knack for capturing vivid details in the environment that immerse us in the specificity of the places we visit, though he also has a first-timer’s enthusiasm for flashy tricks that doesn’t always serve the movie). Simply put, it’s a rare movie that invites you to truly inhabit the world as someone else sees it, and Diggs, Casal, and Lopez Estrada have lived and imagined richly enough to make the experience a completely immersive and transportive one. Any missteps it make make out of overeagerness are completely forgotten in the face of its amiable, but unmistakable, ambition. Movies this timely and incisive are rarely so warm and appealing, and it’s enough to genuinely leave one hopeful for the future. Hopefully that’s not my blind spot.
Also,
happy belated 2018 I guess. For the next little bit we’ll be revisiting those
heady days fully half a year ago when we were all still so young and full of
hope.
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