SERIOUSLY FUNNY
Blindspotting uses humour to take a look at a weighty American problem
When we first meet Collin, the character played by Daveed Diggs in Blindspotting, he’s just another black man getting out of jail in Oakland, Calif.
His year of probation requires that he not leave the county, abide by a curfew and stay out of trouble.
Three hundred and sixty-two days later, Collin seems to be a model of rehabilitation. He’s back at his halfway house every night by 11 (give or take five minutes) and holding down a job at a moving company, where he takes great care not to accidentally leave Alameda County.
But if you judge a man by the
company he keeps — and one of the arguments of Carlos López Estrada’s feature directing debut is that maybe you shouldn’t always — then Collin is living on the edge of criminality thanks to his (illegal) gun-toting friend Miles (Rafael Casal). Miles is white, by the way.
Blindspotting was written over a period of years by Diggs and Casal, who, like the characters they play, have been friends since childhood. They are close enough that Collin sometimes calls Miles the N-word affectionately. So does Miles’ wife, who is also black. But people who don’t know Miles sometimes mistake his street talk for an affectation, which leads to another of the film’s arguments, that maybe cultural appropriation isn’t always as clear-cut as it seems.
The funny thing about Blindspotting is just how funny it is, given how thought-provoking it also is. It’s got the pacing of a sitcom, and features some weirdly riotous scenes, such as the bit where Miles busts into a hairdressing salon with an offer of cut-rate hair tongs, which results in Collin being used as an experimental subject to test their abilities.
But then you’ll get a scene with Wayne Knight as a photographer whose work includes pictures of Oakland properties with oak trees superimposed on them; the trees themselves are long gone, part of the ongoing gentrification of parts of the city.
Or, much darker, the night when Collin, stopped at a red light and itching to get home before his curfew, witnesses an act of police violence he is powerless to influence. It haunts him for the rest of the movie; one imagines it will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Blindspotting — the unusual term will be defined by Collin’s ex-girlfriend Val, given sympathetic portrayal by Janina Gavankar — is one of a number of films this summer that put a sharp focus on the black experience in America. And like Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and Spike Lee’s upcoming BlacKkKlansman, it ends on a powerful note, this time as Collin constructs a freewheeling rap/poem to give voice to the demons that trouble him. The movie is great fun; the underlying messages couldn’t be more serious.