Blindspotting (2018)
Directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada
Written by Daveed Diggs
Starring Daveed Diggs, Rafael Cassal, Janina Gavankar, Ethan Embry
Blindspotting is a stunningly modern, of the moment movie. Directed by first time feature director Carlos Lopez Estrada and written by and starring Daveed Diggs, Blindspotting attacks our moment in time with a powerful story of race, crime. Fear and getting by. Set in Oakland, the film makes the changing city a character as well as Silicon Valley spills outward, gentrification feels like a threat, not exactly the worst threat these characters face.
In Blindspotting Daveed Diggs stars as Collin, an Oakland twenty-something with just three days left on his probation. Collin spent several months in jail and has spent the past year in a halfway house but in three days he’s free. All he has to do is stay out of trouble. This is harder than it seems as Collin’s best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal) appears determined to locate trouble. One of the first scenes in the movie finds Miles, with Collin unwittingly in tow, buying a gun.
Miles says it is to protect his family but Collin doesn’t care, he just wants to never see it and hope that he doesn’t get in trouble for being near it. The two men have been friends since childhood and it was Miles who came to see Collin in jail every week and gave him money and generally looked after him. Miles makes this very clear in conversations about Collin’s ex-girlfriend and current boss at a moving company, Val (Janina Gavankar).
But that isn’t the story. One night after dropping off Miles and returning the moving truck to the company, Collin sees a young black man run past his truck, followed by a white police officer (Ethan Embry). The officer shoots the man in the back as the young man yells ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!.’ Collin and the cop lock eyes for a moment before other cops arrive and Collin is told to leave the scene.
You think you know where Blindspotting might be headed after that but you will be surprised. The film is rarely about the shooting. The full breadth of this story is about the shooting but it’s about it in a much wider context of racism in general. The shooting is endemic of the larger problem at the heart of American race relations. It’s about how we see each other, the assumptions we make and how we fail to question those assumptions.
Blindspotting features one of the best scenes of 2018. I won’t spoil it for you, it’s the ending of the movie. Daveed Diggs is known for his stage performance as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton and he takes some of that Hamilton stage skill and bring it to this powerful scene in which he raps about all that we’ve seen before in the film and in the life experience of the character. It’s stagy, yes, but I could not rip myself away from it.
The scene is incredibly powerful and director Carlos Lopez Estrada deserves a lot of credit for the staging of the scene. He creates a suspenseful ticking clock using a security system that keeps the scene incredibly tense throughout on top of Daveed Diggs’ incredible monologue. Rafael Casal’s Miles is only a witness in the scene but even how he’s used plays into the deep emotions of the scene, his face is indelible in the moment.
The use of close-ups in Blindspotting is also quite powerful. A scene where Collin is walking down an empty street with a gun in his pocket and a cop pulls u-turn is punctuated by a close-up of Diggs’ face in the bright light of a police spotlight and then darkness. It’s a minor scene but it is filled with a remarkable level of emotion and that close-up is stunning. There are other powerful close-ups as well in the shooting scene and in that powerhouse ending that I talked about.
Blindspotting is a testament to the powerful words of Daveed Diggs who wrote the screenplay and stars and to director Carlos Lopez Estrada who found a terrific way to introduce himself to feature filmmaking. This is an arresting, fascinating, suspenseful and emotional movie. Diggs and Casal use their friendly dynamic to make the movie less oppressive and more watchable than my description, the film does loosen its grip to let you breath and even laugh but, for the most part this is a tightly wound and engrossingly modern drama.
