Mark Reviews Movies: BLINDSPOTTING

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 20, 2018

The juxtapositions begin immediately. The opening credits of Blindspotting feature a split-screen montage of the people, places, and culture of Oakland, California. When it begins, we see the touristy, "friendly" part of the city on one side of the screen and the "real" Oakland on the other. It continues, giving us glimpses of hipsters who have relocated here and the folks who have lived there for generations.

At a certain point, the two sides of the screen start showing similar images—of people driving around in cars and fans of the local professional football team. It's a reminder that, even though the images from the first section of the montage were divided by an arbitrary lines in the center of the screen, they were still part of the same image—two halves but one whole.

So much of this film is about juxtapositions and dualities. The city itself is in the process of undergoing a significant change, with tech companies bringing in people who are accustomed to a certain type of consumerist culture. Gentrification is changing the face of Oakland here, as businesses open or reinvent themselves in an attempt to cater to the new arrivals. There's obvious tension here. People who have lived here their entire lives are seeing their favorite places being redecorated, their favorite fast food joints getting vegan-friendly menus, and strange, green vegetable drinks showing up at the counter of the corner store.

Most of the original local folks are adjusting. The protagonist's mother takes out a second mortgage to help her daughter get through school, because she doesn't want to sell the house, now that the neighborhood has good food.

Some aren't adjusting and find it distasteful. Gentrification is changing everything they knew. The old houses, now abandoned from people leaving or dying, are being gutted by real-estate vultures who want to turn the old into something new. Change is tough, especially when it's change to something as defining as the place where you grew up, stuck around, and started a life.

That's the backdrop of Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs' screenplay—their first. The two also star as best friends Collin (Diggs) and Miles (Casal), who grew up, stuck around, and started a life in Oakland. Continuing the film's multiple juxtapositions, Collin is black, and Miles is white. Despite the racial differences, their experiences seem to be similar enough at first, although appearances can be deceiving.

At the story's start, Collin is being released from a two-month prison sentence for a crime that reveals itself later—and then reveals itself again from a different point of view. He'll be on probation for a year, while living in a halfway house, keeping up a job, and avoiding any sort of criminal infraction, lest he have his probation extended or be thrown in prison again.

Eleven months and 27 days later, Collin has three days remaining on his probationary period. He works as a professional mover with Miles at a company where his ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar) works. She helped Collin get the job, but she doesn't want a romantic relationship with him anymore—not after she saw what happened that got him locked up in a county penitentiary.

While on his way back to the halfway house in a company moving truck, Collin witnesses a seemingly unjustified police shooting. A man is running from a cop (played by Ethan Embry), and Collin watches as the officer shoots the man, with his back turned while fleeing. He and cop share a long stare at each other, and as more officers arrive, Collin is instructed to leave the scene.

This event is a constant undercurrent as Collin and Miles' adventures in moving jobs, hanging out, and trying, despite Miles' best efforts, to stay out of trouble. Director Carlos López Estrada (Adding to the list of firsts, this is his debut feature) and Diggs portray the aftereffects of witnessing an apparent murder of a black man by a police officer in way that's similar to how the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder are often shown on screen.

There are flashes of the now-dead man's face, looking at Collin as he runs for his life. The sound of a car alarm triggers the memory of the shooting, as the blaring gunshots set off one down the street from the man's body. A nightmare sequence has Collin in a courtroom, as he's left speechless by a bunch of bullets in his mouth.

It's a constant, this fear and this feeling of powerlessness. It's something to which Miles can sympathize but cannot understand. Val puts it to Collin quite plainly: If a cop had shown up during the crime that got him a prison sentence, they wouldn't have shot Miles, who was as much a participant in the crime as Collin.

Miles, who regularly shows off a pistol he bought from a mutual acquaintance, can never really understand his position in relation to Collin's fear of being arrested, put back in prison, or killed if anything goes wrong while he's still on probation or, for that matter, at any point in his life. The gun, by the way, features prominently in four scenes of unmitigated terror: once in Miles' hands after he gets into a fight, once in his apartment with his girlfriend Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and their young son (played by Ziggy Baitinger), once in Collin's pocket as a police cruiser follows him down the street, and ultimately in Collin's hands when face-to-face with the source of his trauma.

At the core of the film is the friendship between Collin and Miles, as the former starts to realize both the error of his ways and the hard truth that his very existence makes certain people look at him as if he's acting in error, while Miles continues to behave with a recklessness that is, to an extent, his privilege. It comes as little surprise to learn that Diggs and Casal, both of whom are exceptional in their respective roles, have been friends since they were teenagers.

There's a genuine sense of camaraderie and affection between these two characters that cannot be faked—and that makes the inevitable clash between the two, as Miles admits his own insecurities and Collin calls out his friend on his inability to comprehend this real fear, even more heartbreaking. Blindspotting is a searing depiction of a friendship that, like the city where the friends live, is going to change—whether they like it or not.

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