Pizza & a Movie #50: "Emily the Criminal"
“If you want to tell me what to do, put me on the payroll!”
“Emily the Criminal”
2022 • 1hr 37mins • R • Stream on Netflix • Watch trailer
💎 Streaming Gems: You’re paying for Netflix. But what’s good on there?
Editor’s note (mild spoilers): This film depicts moments of physical assault against a woman. None lead to permanent bodily harm but are tense and reflective of many people’s real experiences at the hands of others. Please take care of yourself.
Look, I don’t have many rules for this Pizza & a Movie reviews thing. One is “no bummers”, meaning I avoid flicks that are sad, long, serious, or all three. No Oscar-bate, basically. Another rule is “nothing from this year”. We’re narrowly avoiding breaking both rules tonight as we carry a giant thermal tote full of criminal acts with 2022’s Emily the Criminal. It’s a crime thriller about what you do when you’re all out time and second chances.
Here’s the plot. Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is drowning in student loan debt. She’s dying to pay it off, bug out to South America and make art, but her felony record makes grabbing a good job impossible. The fantasy stays a fantasy. Emily’s gig economy coworker, Javier (Bernardo Badillo) connects her to Youcef (Theo Rossi), who says he runs a secret shopper thing. Emily clocks it as a scam immediately, but the money’s too good to pass up. With a Youcef-supplied fake credit card in hand, Emily buys a flat screen and starts her career in fraud. If the world thinks she’s a criminal, maybe the only way out is to be one. Meanwhile her friend, Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), a something-or-other at an ad agency, dangles the possibility of an interview at her firm. Maybe going straight is on the table after all. Caught between two worlds, can Emily make either one work for her while there’s still time? Are Liz or Youcef good dudes, or will they take from her too? And how do you get a dozen flat screens across town for a Craigslist buyer anyway? Because this Toyota is getting mighty full.
Aubrey Plaza own this. She’s as powerful a microexpressions actor here as she is in the recent second season of The White Lotus. Her last year this interesting was ’17, when Legion premiered and The Little Hours and Ingrid Goes West hit theaters. Throughout Emily, we see a series of thoughts pass across our heroine’s face without a word of dialogue. We get it. No words necessary. Plaza herself brings all that to this performance herself. That’s not script. It’s pure acting.
There was a time—the Parks and Rec era—when Plaza might have become a character actor. Someone who creates goofy, abrasive, nebbishy characters that spice up otherwise mainstream proceedings. But she didn’t. Instead, she’s been a steadily rising movie star who plays The Aubrey Plaza Persona in nearly every project. Our most visible movie stars are those who play the exact same person flick after flick. Your Tom Cruises, your Jennifer Lawrences, your Dwayne Johnsons. But the best ones pivot their offerings so the audience gets a performance of a piece with the project while the actor builds a cohesive body of work. Emily Blunt or Bradley Cooper can surprise you over and over while still being sort of what you expect out of them. Plaza is one of those.
This was a pandemic project. Shooting took just three weeks in late ’21. We covered Disenchanted a few weeks back, which also filmed during the pandemic. Disenchanted took the village approach—a contained local with scores of tested extras. Emily goes the other way, keeping the call sheet very short. Here, that tactic works to ratchet up the tension. Emily’s life feels claustrophobically small, as if no one wants to go near her. As a result, we’re jammed in the passenger seat next to Emily for a bumpy ride at high speed. Emily does things, but it never feels like she has real choices. All her choices are bad. And there’s no time to think about them. As Vanessa Zimmer of Sundance put it, “The pace of the film is deliberately relentless.”
Emily has a lot on its mind. I walked away with three big themes:
✔ Bad bosses
Emily’s kitchen manager exploits his workers. Liz’s ad agency boss dangles the hook of an undefined job on the string of half a year of unpaid labor. Youcef’s brother not only doesn’t pay him but steals everything they made together faster than Youcef can. He seems ready to kill Youcef over it. Emily’s only hope it to be top of the pile herself.
✔ System of shambles
In Emily’s world (and many sectors of our own), food service is corrupt. So is corporate hiring. And so is, less surprisingly, the criminal underworld. Javier stays in his lane at the delivery service but isn’t any better off than Emily. Liz climbed to her current job at the agency but we know how much it cost her. Youcef emigrated to America but doesn’t have anything—not even his own mom’s respect. Any of us may figure out how to work the system, but that doesn’t make the system good.
✔ Have the money talk
Emily always asks about the money. Every time Youcef gives her another job. At her agency interview. When Khalil is hiding it. She knows you can’t control your future if you’re not willing to talk money. Emily ends up using Youcef’s grift but in the country she wanted to be in and without a boss above her pocketing all the profit. You gotta talk turkey.
I don’t know if this made money, but it probably didn’t. Emily premiered at Sundance on January 24 of ’22, I’m guessing not in its finished state. It was in theaters in August, rentable by late September. Netflix was streaming it by the end of November. It was cheap, with a production budget of $2M. But the theatrical take was only $2.2M, which surely doesn’t leave enough scratch left over to cover marketing costs. But, hey, small bets, small losses. And are there really any losses here? Actors and a crew had jobs during a tricky time. Plaza got to prove she could carry a movie. Critics liked it. We, the audience, got a great-looking, well acted, tightly written thriller for grown-ups that won’t cost you anything on top of what you already pay for Netflix. These don’t come along every day.
It’s another entry in Plaza’s increasingly unignorable body of work. I hesitate to say she’s going places because, folks, I think she already has.
Next week is a catch-up week for me. I’ll be back in your inbox on January 20th for 10 Things I Hate About You. I’ve been meaning to rewatch it for ages! I haven’t written that review yet, so Plans Could Change™, but that’s what’s on the spreadsheet.
Anything you think would be fun to cover this year?
NOTES:
Plaza was cast in Parks and Rec and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in the same week. Before, she was just a couple steps away from being on the cast of Saturday Night Live during its ‘00s heyday.
Read more about “The Reinvention of Aubrey Plaza”.
This was writer/director John Patton Ford’s first movie. He made student project Patrol as his thesis while studying at AFI, which also premiered at Sundance. Impressive.
I particularly liked the choice not to make this a romance. It could have had an Out of Sight type angle. Feels true to being at the bottom rung of the survival ladder.
According to IMDb, this was shot in “the worst parts of LA”.
Maybe it’s because of LA, maybe it’s the wall-to-wall moral gray tones, but I get strong Heat and Collateral vibes from this.
I put my graphic design chops to work for the image at the top. Are you as into it as I am? (Potentially impossible)