When you see a movie twice in one week (as I just did – four
days apart) and the humorous bits crack you up, the dramatic scenes catch you
up, and the poignant moments choke you up both times, you know that the film
has something very special going for it. That is certainly the case with Blindspotting,
a comedy/drama that is the best motion picture I’ve seen so far this year.
Blindspotting is a buddy movie about modern urban life, its
joys and its dilemmas; a film with a rare warmth; a tough, sometimes fraught, yet
quite touching narrative; a belief in and compassion for its characters; a
healthy sense of humor; a deep sense of place and the importance of community;
a lyrical rhythm and poetic language; contemporary, timely themes emotional
intelligence; and oodles of charm. It is engaging, exuberantly compassionate, and
entertaining from the opening montage to the closing credits, while challenging
us intellectually and emotionally. That’s
quite a lot in a ninety-five-minute package.
The story centers on three transformative days in the lives
of two lifelong chums. First there is Collin, an African-American man who has just
three days left on his probation for an (initially) unspecified crime, who is
trying to walk the straight and narrow, get through this and restart his life. Collin
is a fearful man – fearful of violating his probation and returning to jail, of
course, but also of losing the love of his former girlfriend, Val (Janina
Gavankar); of being stereotyped by the constantly roving police as a thug by virtue
of being a young black male; and more generally, of failing at life. He is played by talented actor, singer,
rapper, writer Daveed Diggs, previously best known for his dual roles as the Marquis de
Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the original Broadway production of the 2015 musical, Hamilton (earning Tony and a
Grammy awards for his efforts), and as the vocalist in Clippings - a hip-hop
band out of L.A. [And now also for his ongoing roles in the TV series Blackish and Snowpiercer.]
Collin’s endeavors are complicated by Miles, his best friend
since third grade, a buddy whose loyalty is absolute, but whose reckless impetuosity
threatens to undermine Collin. Miles is a white man who has grown up on the
streets of West Oakland, a predominately African-American neighborhood, and has
so thoroughly adopted the style and mannerisms of urban black culture as to
seem almost clownish. Yet, as portrayed by Rafael Casal, we see the man-boy
under the surface – his playfulness, his need for love and acceptance, his
barely suppressed anger and frustration in a world that seems to be spinning
out of control. Casal is a poet, writer, rapper and actor previously best
known for his appearances on the Def Poetry Jam [and now, perhaps, for this movie].
Diggs and Casal were themselves boyhood friends in Oakland,
familiar from childhood with the myriad dangers of life on the urban street,
what with gangs, drugs, repressive policing and the like; and at the same time
nostalgic for the strong sense of community each felt in their neighborhood, a
neighborhood now rapidly changing due to gentrification, itself spurred by rising
real estate and rental prices, and an influx of techies and hipsters. They cowrote
the audacious screenplay for Blindspotting with these thoughts in
mind. These two guys are also terrific actors and their empathy and rapport is reflected in the credibility of their
performances as Collin and Miles. These two characters so close, they are like
two parts of a whole, like yin and yang, brothers from different mothers. As
Casal has put it, “They’re like a two-person gang. Even when they’re with other
people, it’s them two.”
But the context of their deep bond is changing, as is the
world they live in. Collin, with only three days to go, has been trying really
hard to abide by the probation-imposed curfew and other restrictions, to keep
his nose clean and stay out of trouble. This not so easy for a black man in a minority
neighborhood, where confrontation and violence are common. It’s also dawning on
Collin that once released, he will need to abide by his own set of rules; because the
course of his life, not least his hoped-for reconciliation with Val, will depend
on the choices that he makes. Meanwhile, Miles is in a committed relationship
with Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and they have a pre-school aged kid, Sean
(adorable Ziggy Baitinger). Through the events of the film, he comes to appreciate
that masculinity entails a lot more than the wisecracking, risk-taking, tough-guy
veneer he wears on the street; that being a man means accepting and even
embracing responsibility; that friendship and family is serious business, not
all fun and games. In other words, Collin and Miles are not kids anymore.
That Collin is on probation makes everything in his life
that much more fraught. Police cars regularly cruise the streets, making
him feel especially vulnerable. He lives in a half-way house, where any
infraction of the rules is noticed. And early in the film while driving to his
residence just before curfew, he is witness to a policeman shooting a fleeing
Black suspect in the street – an incident and an image which haunts him, and
us, throughout the balance of the movie.
A distinctive feature of Blindspotting is the
tendency of Miles, and especially Collin, to sometimes use verse – rhyming couplets
and quatrains – to express their impressions and emotional response to events
in their world, especially its troubling aspects – of which, it turns out,
there are many. This is mostly done in a tentative, experimental manner – as if
they are trying out lyrics for a rap, composing on the spot, and seeking the
other’s approval. As the film moves along we come to understand that this is a very
natural thing for them. There is no suggestion that either one has any intention of recording this stuff – rather, it is just a safer and more meaningful way of expressing oneself, in a world where a more straightforward,
prosaic statement might be embarrassing. And surely it is, as well, a creative
outlet for guys whose days are spent doing menial jobs (they work for a moving
company).
I found this urban poetry aspect of Blindspotting
charmingly beautiful and emotionally revealing. In the culminating scene when
Collin’s versification comes full flower, the drama and emotionality of the
moment is only magnified by his ability to so express his pent-up anger
and angst.
In an interview with Diggs and Casal in The Atlantic (July 17, 2018), Casal said that he and Diggs always intended to make use of verse this way in their movie. ”Diggs’ and my backgrounds are both in poetic verse and music, so expressing complicated ideas in short amounts of time and compressed language through metaphor was the exciting part of storytelling that we were most comfortable with.”
Diggs says, “We were always trying to make it part of the
fabric of the world, because it is. Because that’s how Oakland feels to us. It’s
a place where there’s a premium on language and where you score points … even
just conversationally by speaking pretty, you know? So we try to bake that into
the film enough to justify these more overt verse sections, so it never felt as
if … the reality had to be shifted in order to have a song or whatever - which is what a lot of [traditional] musicals
do when characters suddenly break into song.”
Diggs later adds, ”We both came up through Youth Speaks, a
spoken word youth program. You teach your kid poetry because nobody cares what
they have to say unless they make it sound pretty. So we wanted to get to a
point where Collin has to be heard. The stakes are life and death. What he
needs is to be heard by the object of all his trauma, … the nightmare that’s
been haunting him. … That’s why we learned how to write poems in the first
place was in order to be heard.”
During the course of these two friends’ journey,
Blindspotting touches on and explores a variety of themes, among them police
violence; gun proliferation; class and racial prejudice; cultural
appropriation; economic stratification and the changes this brings to
communities. Race and identity loom particularly
large as points of tension in Miles and Collins friendship. The loss of community is another big one.
The picture is set in the authors’/stars’ home town, Oakland,
California. I’ve previously commented that the recent Sorry To Bother You (2018), also set in Oakland, was somewhat of a paean
to this city, but Blindspotting is an even more romantic love-letter – a quality
displayed in the hometown-boosting clothing many characters wear, in the
frequent references to Oakland locales in the dialogue, and in the many images
of The Town captured in the cinematography, including the opening montage.
All this, however, is in service of the more encompassing theme of community: the
idea that a town or a neighborhood can be like a home or a family; a
comfortable place to “belong” to, along with others of your social or economic
or ethnic class. Juxtaposed unfavorably
against the comfortable, somewhat nostalgic notion of homey neighborhoods is
the tide of gentrification - what with the local fast-food joint having gone
quasi-gourmet; run-down old homes being bought, updated and flipped at inflated
prices by speculators; the neighborhood bodega selling health-food drinks; and wealthy,
white out-of-towners moving in, making the area less and less affordable for the
prior residents; while bringing shallow, elitist, community-busting values to the
place. For Collin and Miles, home doesn’t
feel quite like home anymore. (On the other hand, when Collin’s mother is
asked if she’s going to sell her house, she says “Hell no!”, not when there are
finally some good restaurants moving into the neighborhood.)
Blindspotting’s multiple themes reflect very real concerns and
are presented in a quite natural and engaging way – making them personal to the
movie’s likable, salt of the earth characters. But while the film raises many
questions, for the most part it does not provide answers – perhaps because
there are no easy solutions to issues like gentrification. One can be
sympathetic, but that doesn’t mean there is a simple remedy - from either a
moral or a practical perspective. During a housing shortage for example, do middle-class
families – even techies or hipsters - have a moral obligation to avoid renting
or buying homes in reasonably affordable neighborhoods? If we’re talking about traditionally Black
or Latino neighborhoods, should white people be discouraged or banned from
applying? Would that be constitutional –
or even desirable? Do we even need laws about this? Or are we simply talking
about respecting one another and not being a-holes?
But I digress.
For those concerned about such things, I should note that Blindspotting
has received its R-rating primarily because of language and some “brutal
violence”, as the MPAA puts it. There are three scenes of violence in this film
– two fight scenes, somewhat brutal, but economical and appropriate to the
story, and the aforementioned police shooting, which may be emotionally jarring
but not graphically gory. None of this is glorified. There is also frequent use
of what we now refer to as the “N-word” – not by fascists or racial bigots,
but colloquially within the neighborhood. This usage becomes one of the
dramatic issues in the story.
Blindspotting is, at times,
jarringly dramatic – in the best way. The drama moves us, allows us to feel what
the characters feel and walk, if only for a moment, in their shoes – that is, to connect soulfully with these quite real people. The fact that they seem
so real is a credit to the writing and the exquisite performances of the two
leads and the rest of the cast. It must be emphasized too, that it's not all bleakness and hard times. Blindspotting is frequently funny – sometimes hilariously so. Likewise, it is perceptive,
witty, wise, and very much of our moment.
The photography, pacing, quality of performance and vision belies the
fact that this is the first feature film by director, Carlos Lopez Estrada and
writers Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs. It is one of those rare pictures that is
not only a slice of life, it’s full
of life. You will walk out feeling exhilarated by its honesty, its intelligence
and its sheer audacity. In short, it is brilliant.
Blindspotting
gets my highest recommendation.
1 hour 35 minutes. Rated R
Grade: A+
Available with a subscription to HBO Max and HBO Now; and rentable on many streaming platforms including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Vudu/Fandango.
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