“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
Another line comes to mind when I think of what she’s achieved in tandem with Emily the Criminal’s writer/director, John Patton Ford. (Given that name, did he have any choice but to become a commander in film?) Godard muses somewhere (in JLG by JLG?) that “culture is about the rules; art is about breaking them.” Emily the Criminal breaks with the model of neo-agit-prop film-making currently in favor on the faux-left. It limns a legitimation crisis (due to rising inequality) yet its anti-capitalism doesn’t devolve into scapegoating. The film is both artfully plain and morally complex.
The L.A. on view in this picture isn’t a California Dream, though Patton proves he can shoot for beauty in South-of-the-Border scenes late in the flic. He takes a documentary realist approach to workaday L.A. His less than sunny left coast is truer to life than, say, the eleganza nowhere featured in that idiot ideologue’s tour Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri which opens…
with some magnificently photographed images of three huge, abandoned billboards in a deserted countryside. There is a powerful sense of irony, of cathedrals of commerce falling into disrepair. Yet the artists showing us this decadence are wonderfully competent; the haunting choral music they choose to heighten the pathos declares their sophistication. We are celebrating how prettily we know how to present our decline.
Per Tim Parks’ matchless polemic against Three Billboards’ makers and the genteel audience who believe “it is watching something serious while it is actually being fed a diet of eye candy, violence, and standard repartee.” Emily the Criminal, by contrast, is truly serious about the state of our union—and what goes on in American work/life when unions are weak. It’s not dicking around about “our decline.” Unlike Three Billboards’ creatives, it makes no claim (pace Parks) “to moral superiority at the expense of a community that it has taken no time to examine.”
Emily the Criminal’s auteur has paid attention to how people survive in L.A. when the parade has passed them by. It puts you in the shoes of its anti-heroine, though it’s neither sentimental nor judgmental toward her. Emily has a heart, spine and some imagination. She likes to draw. Yet Emily is a full-metal bildung of a scam artist, not the tale of a quashed artist-in-the-making, which doesn’t mean Emily is an unsympathetic soul. You feel implicated as you watch her moral arc bend toward fraud. You know she has her reasons. Heavy student loan debt and no decent job prospects since she has a criminal record for committing an assault. Though you don’t learn how she crossed the Dostoevsky line in her back story until late in the movie and, by that point, the reveal is an amplifier not an explainer. She’s already proved to be madder than most of us. Emily/Aubrey breaks the rules in part because she’s an exception—a naturally courageous person unphased by brutes and bad actors.
Aubrey Plaza is a good one and she animates Emily with her own high pride, which is at once American at its core and a thing so rare nowadays that Emily’s seems estimable. (Almost.) With Emily/Aubrey, you know a contest is coming. You get a taste at the top of the movie when she snaps at a job interview. She does it again later because she can’t help but show her iron when a would-be boss comes on from above. It’s wrong to get too cute about her explosive talk-back in these scenes (and others), since it’s a tell that she’s on her way to a life of crime’s oblivion. Yet her flair-Ups remind you of Keats’ remarks on the “fineness” of a quarrel in the street. One key to Plaza’s performance lies in her readiness to contest, her brooding will to prove herself and take down her humiliators.
The film will be lost on anyone who won’t step out on the wire with Emily/Aubrey—those who “remain locked in some terribly easy version of themselves.” (To steal a line from poet Adam Scheffler who, btw, liked Emily the Criminal lots.) I’d bet that line describes The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody who spelled out plenty of reasons why one might respond fully to Emily the Criminal in a review last August. He bowed to the movie’s “fascinating display” of inside dope on low life and notes how “Plaza endows Emily with fierce determination, impulsive physicality, a sharply defiant gaze, and general yet unrelenting energy that pervades and heightens the entire film.” Yet Brody remained (somehow) unmoved. The title for his piece—“‘Emily the Criminal,’ Reviewed: Good Script, Meh Movie”—sums up his non-response.
My own first response wasn’t quite worthy of the film since I was put off by Emily’s violent turns. Her rage seemed tuned to tropes that have polluted the culture since the 90s when the great “horror of softness”[1] took hold and second wave feminism’s next gen began to see their future in killer women. But Emily/Aubrey isn’t a kick-butt winner or #girlboss fantast. She’s never presented as someone to be emulated. Per her lover/co-scammer (who will end up with a broken skull and busted due to her recklessness), she is “a bad influence.” Though it is complicated. In a recent Q&A Plaza nixed the notion the film was “Joker but for girls with student loans.”
The New Yorker:…Did you see her as a hero who was down on her luck, or were you playing her as an antihero?
Plaza: I was just playing her as a human being. I wouldn’t say she’s like the Joker at all. The Joker is evil! What the fuck?…I mean, yes, she’s an antihero. . . which is one thing I really liked about the script. There aren’t a lot of female characters that take on that antihero status, because audiences are used to seeing female characters that they have to like. She’s flawed, but I don’t think she’s an evil psychopath and murderer—yet.
Plaza got her own brain into the act:
What’s driving her? Why is she doing these things? Especially in this movie—her choices are so insane. I’m just trying to create a fully realized, multidimensional human being that you feel is real. That’s how I approached her. And I think it’s up to the audience to decide how they feel about that.
Plaza’s own wonder at those insane choices helps her make Emily into one of those rare figures on film whose mental wheels seem to turn like the reel. Though Emily/Aubrey’s way in the world isn’t always heady. The second time through the film I was struck by a moment in a less than mindful post-bar-scene. Coked up with a girlfriend who’s puking on the street after hours, Emily starts doing push-ups. She may be an artist manque but she’s always ready for basic training.
What she gets instead is training-in-crime. The movie’s how-to scenes about credit card fraud are gripping and not a little romantic. Emily bonds with her tutor—Youcef (Theo Rossi), a Lebanese immigrant with interior designer dreams. His charm radiates from his skill. (Is there anything more sexy than watching somebody display a secret dexterity—Do me like you do that!) Emily the Criminal’s tutoring scenes remind me of crafty bits in films by the Dardennes brothers. John Patton Ford has surely clocked the Dardennes’ near-documentary dramas about class-bound, existential choices made by beings on the margins. Emily the Criminal sent me back to the Dardennes’ Rosetta. The un-rosy antihero of that movie is younger, worse-off, and even less mellow than Emily. She can’t imagine, as Emily can, having “experiences.” The Dardennes press you to walk with her through the long slog of her dailiness. (You watch Rosetta cross the highway to get to the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother and then, again and again, take off her would-be work shoes to put on rubber boots for the muddy part of the trip.) The charm of travel is beyond Rosetta, whereas Emily-on-the-lam gambols down stone steps and drinks in a Latin evening. Both their stories, though, build toward acts of betrayal that are as clarifying as a sucker-punch: Rosetta and Emily are dangers to The People, and, more specifically, to workers of their world (in and out of the illegal economy).
Neither woman is a danger to the world as it is. That came home to me when I recalled Emily/Aubrey’s back and forth with a prickly boss at her non-union food service job. The boss rubs in her powerlessness. That’s foul. What’s true, too, is that he shows her no mercy in part because she stepped out in the midst of a shift, leaving her co-worker to handle their job alone, while she slipped off to pursue her illicit side action.
Emily’s not irredeemable. (She’s closer to the good thief on the cross next to Jesus than the bad one on the other side who has “no desire for redemption, right to the end.”)[2] In another context, you could see her making another mad choice and becoming a labor organizer, but this Jersey girl wasn’t raised union-strong.
Emily the Criminal’s L.A. is multicultural. Both the boss and that worker at the food service job are people of color, as is Emily’s upwardly mobile girlfriend and Youcef. Nobody’s in this movie, though, to hold it down for their phenotype.
Emily the Criminal’s class-first approach to race matters goes against what comix artist Aaron Lange decries as “faux-progressive currents running through much of Hollywood’s recent output, with just enough woke signifiers and multiracial casting to suggest that the filmmakers are morally responsible NYT subscribers, and not just careerists with inner thoughts that mirror hashtags.” (Picking up on the same trend Tim Parks decried, Lange zeroes in on Hollywood’s prog fans: “They hand out little dopamine hits to audiences, reassuring them that, yes, they are good, they are elite, and they are ‘on the right side of history.’”)
Lange realizes that Emily the Criminal’s wound up wrong heroine stands apart. He’s cited the film (along with The Menu and This Place Rules) for having “a sense of genuine political or social conviction” and raising “real questions about class, status, media, self-image, and power”:
What these films don’t do is look for convenient scapegoats. This is not reactionary or “anti-woke” cinema. But it might be post-woke cinema. And I hope the wave continues throughout 2023 and beyond.
Earlier this year, I surfed a cinematic wave coming from France’s Kourtrajmé Collective. Emily the Criminal‘s auteur John Patton Ford seems to be the transatlantic cousin of Kourtrajmé’s Ladj Ly and Romain Gravas.[3] Thanks to these directors, the future looks good for anyone who’s kept faith with the ideal of film as an art of, by, and for the people.
Notes
1 Per Benjamin DeMott in Killer Women Blues: Why Americans Can’t think Straight About Power and Gender (2000).
2 Per Fr. Rick Frechette: “The Living Jesus and the “Monk’s Alphabet” – First of the Month
3 Richard Brody’s review of Emily the Criminal reminded me of his perplexing take on Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables. There again, the title sums up a dim ambivalence: “The Urgent But Stilted ‘Les Miserables’.” No buts allowed–he must choose! Urgent or stilted. The title’s mash-up isn’t a sign Brody has stated a complex truth; it’s a measure of his incoherence.
The New Yorker seems to be in the habit of making up for Brody’s greatest misses. (See their recent Q&A with Aubrey Plaza.) This is Anthony Lane’s brief on Les Miserables in a summative piece on “The Movies that Mattered in 2020”:
If you cast your mind all the way back to the belle époque, otherwise known as January, you may remember Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables,” which follows a trio of cops through a combustible suburb of Paris. The police are neither heroes nor outright villains. They know their patch, with its wealth of problems, all too well, and not for a second do you mistake their job for an easy ride; nonetheless, it is their overbearing actions that light the fuse. For any idealists out there who still believe in cinema as an international language, here is rousing proof: it fell to a French director to foretell the rage and the unrest that would define the American summer.