Now playing: Emily the Criminal is lean, brutal and nasty
Aubrey Plaza is sensational in the title role
One of my favorite films out of the Sundance Film festival, John Patton Ford’s pungent debut feature Emily the Criminal offers an exciting and thrilling showcase for the leonine, nervy Aubrey Plaza.
Playing a financially vulnerable young woman trying to circumvent her hostile past, Plaza projects the perfect blend of nerves, toughness and survival instinct. Her character is stripped of any sentiment or pity. She is a beautiful woman playing a very unglamorous, even unlikeable character. Plaza has a vivid presence and nervous intensity that is constantly thrilling.
I have been interested in Plaza professionally since her early secondary appearance in Judd Apatow’s Funny People (2009). She has the crack timing and liquid movements of the best comedians of the classic studio era—Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell or Carole Lombard.
At her best and most inventive, Plaza intertwines her droll and stylized line readings with suggestive and kinky body movements. That sexual suggestiveness and anarchic spirit conjures a blithe unpredictability and elastic possibility. The body and voice are never incongruent; they flow and cohere magnificently.
A great example was the concluding work of Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool cycle of films. In Ned Rifle (2014), Plaza showed a breathless delivery and precise comic instinct whose every inflection or body movement is draped in allure or a kinetic sexual double entendre. Her characters are often marked by instability and unpredictability. Nothing ever feels calculated or rushed. She is always taking off, and doing something sublime.
I have only seen a small sample of her films, and none of the television stuff. Since the Apatow film, she has developed a significant amount of technique. Plaza infuses her work with wit, grace and sexually subversive underpinning. With her high cheekbones, dark eyes and beguiling look, she projects a magnetic, slightly feral quality. She is a great deal more than just a beautiful face. She is quick, fast and always alert.
Hollywood is about scale and visibility, and the question is whether she might go the way of somebody like Annette O’Toole, a fantastic actor who has been perennially underutilized or insufficiently appreciated. There are other actors around the same age of O’Toole I could make the same point, like Diane Venora or Maria Conchita Alonso. These dark, beguiling, fantastic actors are always seemingly caught up in the vicissitudes of industry sexism, horrible timing or what we might call just general lack of imagination.
Plaza has been great in other recent Sundance titles—the lead role in Ingrid Goes West (2017), the terrifying, malleable presence in Black Bear (2020). She can play the vixen, the bitch, the beautiful woman next door. She gets inside the parts, flashing the right balance of flexibility and verve.
The depth and soulfulness is also present in the best work. The darker implications of character and action, like the monstrous self-regard that animates her title character in Matt Spicer’s Ingrid Goes West, are acknowledged and fully explored rather than shrugged off as simple quirks of behavior, attitude or self-preservation.
That willingness to never play it entirely straight or safe is incredibly bracing. She is not just collecting the check. At the same time, it’s impossible not to wonder if Plaza is ever going to truly one-up the system. No matter her acuity, intelligence and range, the feeling persists that her talent, charisma and presence are undermined by the wider difficulties of finding material that fully utilizes and deepens her expressive capabilities.
Those larger structural or institutional questions reverberate and deepen the new film. Emily the Criminal is not a career corrective. It’s a small, lean, compelling work that shows a great deal of promise, in front of and behind the camera.
It’s taut, efficient and nasty. It’s a story of self-invention, with an amoral coloring and brutish underside. A woman tired of her dead-end existence falls into the criminal financial black market in Los Angeles. Her intelligence, wary defensiveness and nasty edge make her a natural negotiating those fluid and porous spaces.
The writer and director, John Patton Ford, had just one short to his credit. He has a sharp eye for composition and textures. The subcultural milieu he maps out is persuasive and convincing. Especially now in the cryptocurrency era, where every financial transaction feels nebulous, even circumspect, Ford captures a particular dread and free floating anxiousness about money, status and identity.
The threat of violation is ever-present, with a sense of disruption and brutal retribution. Part of the movie is hard to take, not because the filmmaking is awkward, or the actors have unsatisfying moments. The rhythm is propulsive and ecstatic. The feeling of release is fragmented or wholly cut off. This is not a redemption story, or one of clear lines and easy moral distinctions.
In fact, Emily is probably caught in the least desirable predicament for an educated, skilled woman in this part of the 21st century. She has little autonomy or freedom. Her talent, toughness, even grace, have little viability or meaning given her circumstances. She owes some $70,000 in student debts. A felony assault conviction hampers any real chance at a significant professional career.
Ford works in opposites and contrasts. Emily’s stark situation is counterpointed against her best friend, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke). The two grew up together in Newark and went to art school. Her friend is ascendant, working at a coveted LA advertising boutique. By contrast, Emily’s life feels under constant surveillance and harsh judgment, sharply illustrated in the opening job interview sequence.
Emily is a hustler trying to outrun a past that she increasingly learns is incapable of being wiped clean. As Plaza nimbly shows, the differences between her life as a gig worker and frequently abused low-level caterer and her criminal activity are negligible. They are on the same continuum. As she becomes a player in an underground economy that uses fake credit cards to buy high end merchandise, Emily prospers because she intuitively recognizes the absence of any true distinction.
If character is destiny and movies are fundamentally stories of discovery, Emily understands the naked aggression and desperation of living moment to moment. She is a rationalist who understands abject human motivation and desire.
The situations Emily is increasingly called upon to maneuver, like a tense action where she has a limited time to buy a car before her ruse is uncovered, sharply illustrates her necessary nerve and cutthroat action.
Ford and his talented cinematographer, Jeff Bierman, play off the restricted and claustrophobic spaces impressively. The camera, largely hand held, is mobile and fluid, and consistently stays tight on the actors. As Emily plunges deeper into this entrancing and exacting world, she gathers a confident and brutal competence. She takes a punch, and is never afraid to mete out her own brand of justice.
This is her unsentimental education. Ford is apparently a fan of the French director Jacques Audiard. A Self-Made Hero (1996) and A Prophet (2009) color and shape each section of the new film. Emily is constantly pulled between worlds, of respectability represented by Liz, and the excitement and freedom of the underworld, marked by Youcef (Theo Rossi), her transgressive and emotional entry point to a life without boundaries.
It’s also liberating to see a movie centered on a woman that feels fairly unapologetic about race, class and doctrinaire sexual politics. Ford brings distinction and discernment to that part of the story. Plaza unleashes a formidable sexual energy to much of her work. The wounded Emily is more self-contained and withholding. Even her sexual attraction to Youcef is offset by their bleak alternate fates.
Watching the movie, I was reminded of certain Jim Thompson novels, like The Getaway or The Grifters (not the films made from those books). Whatever you want to call it, an annihilating blankness, desperation, the flat, dingy world it inhabits, and the way fortune constantly ebbs and flows, violently moving in one direction or another.
Ford made his reputation as a writer. (His script Rothchild earned a coveted spot on the Hollywood Black List in 2014.) I thought he was better with the camera, and his actors, than the shaping of his script. The symmetry of characters and situations feels a bit sterile, or overemphatic. The character of Liz is underwritten, and the scenes with her and Emily lack the same vigor and dramatic shape. The set up does allow a great moment for Plaza to unload on the entitled advertising executive played (a little too obviously) by Gina Gershon.
If the scenes involving Liz are the least satisfying, they introduce a crucial theme of betrayal. That notion takes many forms and styles, of class, culture, sex. It also introduces another compelling idea. The movie has a B-movie exploitation edge and energy I appreciated—the idea that every negative action has an equally opposite and terrifying counter action.
The movie belongs to Aubrey Plaza. This is a sharp, well-observed piece of filmmaking. Let’s get real. This is also a low-budget independent film. It’s not going to change the world, or alter her place in the Hollywood firmament. It reveals a talent to watch in John Ford Patton.
Aubrey Plaza gets to go where she belongs—in the center, tenacious and memorable.