While everyone is still focused on Aubrey Plaza’s performance as Harper Spiller in The White Lotus, it bears reminding the masses of another Plaza performance from earlier this year: Emily Benetto in Emily the Criminal. As the eponymous criminal, Emily’s history of “illegal” activity is established in the first scene during an interview at a doctor’s office. Asked by the prospective employer to describe what her felony conviction was, he claims they haven’t run a background check on her because they “don’t usually do that.” When she proceeds to tell a gentler lie about her past crime, the doctor then comes at her with a file and says, “So this is your official background check, which I have read, and according to the state, you were convicted of aggravated assault in 2016. Is that correct?” Less embarrassed and more enraged by this revelation, Emily demands, “So you do have all my information?” The employer then proceeds to spin her some yarn about how they need to be able to trust her because she would be dealing with “important” files a.k.a. garden-variety medical records. As if she would do anything “untoward” with such “a wealth” of information at her fingertips.
So it is that writer-director John Patton Ford establishes an immediate sense of the vicious circle Emily is caught in. For she’s trying her best to be “aboveboard” by seeking some low-paying, thankless job that’s theoretically “white collar” as she barely stays afloat as an “independent contractor” delivering food for an UberEats-esque catering company. This is why she initially continues to attempt licking the asshole of this would-be employer despite fuming over the underhandedness of his interviewing technique. Finally pushed to her brink, she essentially says what Dave Chappelle did long ago about the real reason she wants to work there: “I’m broke, nigga. I’m broke.” That Emily is, and she’s certain to mention it to the doctor by announcing, “I don’t even want to work here. You asked me why I want this job? Because I got $70,000 of student debt. That’s your fucking answer right there.” And yes, the kernel of the idea for Emily the Criminal stemmed from Patton’s own student loan debt, which Joe Biden briefly feigned “cancelling” for everyone (who didn’t already pay most of it off already) despite this being a virtual impossibility in a country like America, where higher education is an industrial complex that’s too profitable to “allow” students something as seemingly “no-brainer” as financial freedom.
What’s more, although Plaza is of Puerto Rican descent, her ostensible “whiteness” is part of the political aspect of Emily the Criminal. Not just because white girls have an easier time getting away with illegal activity, but because Patton is reminding viewers that everyone not born into wealth struggles and flails, regardless of being white/”white-passing” or not. With Emily’s felony conviction, to boot, it becomes even more of an impossibility to get a “legitimate” job as she’s faced with narrow-minded fuckfaces like the doctor in the first scene that don’t really want to give her a chance.
Thus, when Javier Santos (Bernardo Badillo), a co-worker at the catering company, refers Emily to a phone number for being a “dummy shopper,” she seizes the chance to make an extra two hundred dollars in an hour… not yet aware of what she’ll have to do in order to get it. “Luckily,” one of the ringleaders of the operation, Youcef (Theo Rossi), is there to lay it all out on the table with the spiel, “In the next hour, you will make two hundred dollars cash. But you will have to do something illegal. You won’t be in danger, you won’t endanger another person, but you will be breaking the law. So if you’re not cool with that, I get it, and you can go at any time.” At first, Emily’s instinct is to leave, only prompted to stay by something about Youcef’s radiating confidence and the tantalization of “easy” money (as if there’s ever really such a thing).
Armed with a credit card engraved with stolen information and a fake driver’s license to match the name on it, Emily enters an electronics store and purchases a flatscreen TV. Ironically, it’s the hat she takes off a rack to conceal her face that the security guard ends up calling her out for. Once she gives it back, however, it’s smooth sailing—and it’s clear that’s she’s instantly addicted to the rush (not to mention the money). This being something Youcef can see within her as he offers her another “opportunity,” albeit one with slightly more risk involved that he won’t tell her about until the following day. Initially trying to resist the temptation of the two-thousand-dollar payment she would get from the mystery job, she ends up dipping out on her catering gig to get to Youcef in time. He then informs her she’ll be given a no-credit-limit black card to buy a car, and that she only has eight minutes to get out before the bank calls the vendor to confirm the purchase and the latter realizes it was fraudulent. This leads to the most action-packed scene of the movie, with Emily engaging in a high-speed chase after getting her face smashed in the car door by the dealer who’s been alerted to the scam.
Mercifully, she manages to escape with the car successfully but is livid over the bodily harm that’s been caused to her, and the overall danger that was posed by the nature of the job. Concerned about Emily’s well-being and not wanting to lose her as a henchwoman, Youcef takes far more of an interest in tending to her wounds than he would for any of his other “shoppers.” Offering to come up to her apartment (which she shares with two rather nerdish roommates) and help her ice her face, the duo establishes a deeper bond when Youcef sees her artistic talents after he goes through some of her old sketches. Seeing all the untapped potential she has to suppress because of the need to focus on the bullshit day-to-day of “the grind,” he feels compelled to tell her about his own future plans to buy a forty-unit building and wield it as his rental property cash cow so that he can, theoretically, finally “go legit.” The unspoken rule of this game being that it can’t last forever without the long arm of the law coming to collect sooner or later. But Emily is still too “green” to fully understand that reality as she finds herself asking Youcef to teach him his criminal ways like Mr. Miyagi to the Karate Kid. Thanks to his overt attraction to her, he ends up doing just that.
Emily subsequently learns “the trade” of making her own credit cards with stolen information quite quickly, taking to the art like a newborn to a tit. In fact, she becomes so deft at buying stolen merchandise and reselling it that she loses sight of all cautiousness by violating the only two rules Youcef ever provided for her: 1) never hit the same store twice in a week and 2) never meet someone you’re selling to at your own home. When Emily breaks the latter rule, it leads to her being robbed by a meth head-looking couple—the male in the permutation pinning her down to the floor with a blade to her neck as the woman proceeds to steal the roughly 15K Emily has squared away in her safe, along with the dog she’s been pet-sitting for her high school friend, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke). Propelled by the sheer force of her rage, Emily recovers from the shock of the onslaught, grabs the taser Youcef gave her and marches back outside to their pickup truck to tase both of them and take back what’s rightfully hers (dog included). After all, she did work hard for the money she stole, whereas these goons simply stole it without any personal risk or meticulous preplanning.
Once Liz returns from her trip to Portugal, Emily gives back her dog at a party Liz is having. The majority of the guests are fellow employees at the ad agency where Liz works, making Emily feel mostly uncomfortable because she can’t relate to a single one of these normies. Even so, Liz has been dangling the prospect of a graphic design job at the agency in front of Emily for the past few weeks, finally insisting that she’s secured her a proper interview. Nonetheless, Emily continues to feel awkward and out of place when people ask her questions like, “What do you do then?” Knowing that no one is actually listening, she replies, “Credit card fraud.” She then texts Youcef with an invite to the party, signaling the complete shift in their dynamic from mentor/mentee to full-stop romantic and sexual. To the point where Youcef feels at ease enough with her to request a little “favor” from Emily: play the part of his girlfriend in front of his overbearing mother, Luna (Sheila Korsi).
Showing up to her house for lunch, Luna inquires of Emily, “So what do you do in life?” Ah, that dreaded question for anyone who is a true artist still trying their best to forget about such “quaint dreams.” Emily replies, “I’m not sure yet.” Youcef’s mom assures, “You don’t know? It’s okay. You will figure out your gift. God will give you gift… Maybe Emily the Teacher, Emily the Mother, Emily the Something.” But, of course, she’s already been given her “gift” as Emily the Criminal. And it becomes more and more apparent as the film goes on that she’s strayed too far off the path of the “straight” life to ever be cut out for the drudgery it entails again.
That’s precisely why, when Emily does go to that interview promised by Liz, she’s horrified to find that not only is it merely an assistant job, it’s also an unpaid internship. Liz’s boss, Alice (Gina Gershon), explains, “What we’re looking for here is a design intern… all my assistants are interns. The way it works is the first five to six months, you get to know the business and if you do a great job, then I’d love to discuss [payment] with you.” And it is in this instant that Emily has the full-circle déjà vu to the first interview we saw her in, suddenly absolutely scandalized by the absurdity of what’s expected of her in exchange for literally nothing.
Obviously, Alice is just one of many (particularly on the employer front) to display a total lack of understanding for the vicious cycle of one “bad life decision” and how it perpetuates being stuck in a black pit of broke assery and according hopelessness. Ergo the insensitivity of Alice demanding why Emily didn’t finish her college education after the assault charge. Clearly vexed by the same old interview rigmarole, Emily explains, “I had legal fees and student loans and living expenses, I had to take care of my grandmother. So I had to work.” Alice nods skeptically at first, then delves into the “pitch” about what the “job” would be—an unpaid internship with the unpromised light at the end of the tunnel being actual compensation for one’s eight-hour workdays.
This epiphany of an interview becomes the final nail in the coffin of Emily’s life as a non-criminal, deciding then and there that it’s time to surrender fully to the “dark side” a.k.a. not bending over to what society peddles as “upright” and “correct” when the fact is, “Motherfuckers will just keep taking from you and taking from you until you make the goddamn rules yourself.” So that’s what Emily opts to do as she goes in on one final dangerous spree with Youcef. But, to Emily, none of it feels like that big of a risk anymore—because it’s nothing compared to the greater risk of being stuck where she currently is in life: in that cycle of just keeping one’s head above water. At one point, she tells Youcef, “I just want to be free, you know? I just want to be able to experience things.” That, as most are aware, takes a mountainous pile of cash.
Ultimately, Emily claws and steals her way toward achieving that freedom, paying it forward, as it were, in a foreign land by imparting Youcef’s operation to others as she gives her own signature spiel: “You work. You work down to the bone. That’s how my grandmother said it. It’s never enough, right?” And it never is… unless, by some miracle of luck and cleverness, one manages to be given the “gift,” as Youcef’s mom put it, of being a natural-born criminal. For, if we’re honest about how the world works, everyone at “the top” is a criminal in some form or another. And it’s the poor (literally and figuratively) saps who live in fear of the law that never seem to get ahead in this rigged game called life.
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