A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018)


Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018)

Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kevin Carroll, Nyambi Nyambi, Jon Chaffin, Wayne Knight, Margo Hall. Screenplay: Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs. Cinematography: Robbie Baumgartner. Production design: Tom Hammock. Film editing: Gabriel Fleming. Music: Michael Yezerski.

Blindspotting sets up its essential high-wire tension early in the film when we see Collin (Daveed Diggs) being given the terms of his probation after being released from prison: the usual no drugs, no firearms, no bad company, and so on. Whereupon we almost immediately see him sitting in the back seat of a two-door car that all of a sudden is bristling with the owner's guns. Collin panics: He has three days left before his probation ends. Things get worse when Collin's best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), reveals that he's carrying too. Collin panics, and when he's released from the car heads for the truck he's driving -- he has taken a job with a moving company managed by his ex-girlfriend, Val (Janina Gavankar) -- eager to get to his halfway house before his 11 p.m. curfew. And then he's stopped by a red traffic light that shows no sign of changing, even though there's absolutely no other traffic moving. As he fumes in frustration, a man suddenly runs up to the truck, followed quickly by a cop on foot. As Collin looks on in horror, the cop fires four bullets, killing the other man -- we see him fall in Collin's rear-view mirror. Like Collin, the man is black. And through his side window Collin looks face to face at the cop, who is, needless to say, white. But then the light changes and Collin drives home. Blindspotting is like that throughout, though the rest of Collin's hair's-breadth moments don't involve a fatality. It's about the precariousness of being black when even your closest white friends, like Miles, don't understand the ease with which things can go suddenly wrong. We're constantly aware of the way the world -- or at least Oakland, the beautifully characterized milieu in which Collin's story takes place -- can suddenly turn against Collin, who just wants to stay out of jail. But the remarkable thing about this real and painful fact is that it's the premise on which a very funny and very insightful movie is based. There are critics who fault Blindspotting for an inconsistency of tone, for having one foot in farce and the other in tragedy, but I think that's the brilliance of the film. I doesn't need to hammer its message home. It can make a point about, say, gentrification by showing Collin and Miles at work cleaning out the "junk" in a house that's about to be gutted and turned into an upscale townhouse, just by taking a look at what's been left behind by its former residents: a wedding photograph, an old photo album, in short, a cache of memories about to be obliterated. And it culminates in a lovely sequence in which Collin comes face to face again with the cop, and conquers the man not with a gun but with a rap diatribe. There are those who think this is only a disguised version of the conventional happy ending, but I prefer to see it as a hopeful resolution of the cultural dissonance in which we now live.