‘Blindspotting’ has best line this year
“You sure?”
Those two words, for me, constitute the single best line of dialogue in a movie this year.
So far, anyway.
It’s delivered by Rafael Casal in “Blindspotting,” a terrific, powerful movie. Casal plays Miles, a white man living in Oakland who is incensed by gentrification — and the assumption by many of the people moving in that because he is white, he’s an interloper, too. (He’s a native.)
Casal and Daveed Diggs, who plays Miles’ best friend Collin, wrote the film; their friend Carlos Lopez Estrada directed it. Collin, who is black, has three days to go before he can move out of a halfway house after being convicted of a crime. He’s trying to stay out of trouble which, in the company of the hot-headed Miles, is difficult.
If you haven’t seen the film, you should. It’s one of the year’s best. (Again, so far.) If you haven’t, what follows could be a spoiler, so tread carefully.
How the line unfolds
Miles says the line near the end of the film. Collin has seen a white police officer (played by Ethan Embry) shoot a black man, who was running away, in the back. By coincidence, Miles and Collin, who work as movers, have been dispatched to the cop’s home to move his furniture. Collin can’t stand it; he confronts the officer with a stunning soliloquy — which he raps — expressing his anger, pain and frustration. The officer looks on in silence (there’s a gun involved, Rafael Casal stars in “Blindspotting.”
as well).
Eventually — again with the spoilers here — Collin walks away, leaving the cop and Miles in the room together. The officer looks at Miles, pleading with his eyes, and says he didn’t mean to do it. And that’s when Miles says it:
“You sure?”
It’s not accusatory. It’s a genuine question. And that’s how it was meant to play.
“It’s not Miles on the defense,” Casal said in a recent interview. “It’s like a slightly empathetic Miles.”
“Who is also dealing with his own (expletive),” Diggs said.
Casal laughed. “They are two white men who have anger issues.”
Why the line was changed during filming
Remarkably, that’s not the line that was written. That’s pretty amazing for dialogue that, in two words, encapsulates a lot of the anger and confusion over tensions between people of color and law enforcement.
“That line was changed on set to accomplish that very thing,” Diggs said.
“We were about to roll,” Casal said. “I went up to Ethan, I was like, ‘I’m going to change the line, I’m going to ...’ and he was like, ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me! Just do it.’ We did one take. That was the only take of that line.”
So what was the original line?
“It was, ‘It doesn’t matter’ before,” Diggs said, “which was totally wrong. I’m so happy we changed it.” Me too.