In Emily the Criminal, Aubrey Plaza plays Emily Benetto, a woman saddled with student debt, unable to get a decent job due to a felony assault from her younger days and working an exhausting food delivery job as an independent contractor. When she’s given the opportunity to make a quick couple of hundred bucks by a co-worker, she goes for it, only to find herself carrying out a bit of minor credit card fraud. When she pulls that off smoothly, she’s given the chance to make a little more and just that simply Emily’s off and running in a new world.
I really loved this movie and highly, highly recommend it. It’s a movie that barely tops 90 minutes, but it has a lot on its mind. It’s an exploration of modern criminality, the gig economy, student debt, the inequities of the criminal justice system. But the screenplay is stripped down and character-based; it’s never didactic. It gets at its themes and ideas backhandedly, by watching the character of Emily and her struggles. She’s a smart and essentially capable woman trapped in a bad situation based on the triangulation of several serious modern issues, including crippling student debt, the exploitation of independent contractors in the gig economy and the way one mistake when she was younger and stupider has stamped her forever as a criminal and locked her out of the job market. In the world of fraud and theft, she finds a place where she can flourish; one suspects she might have flourished in a more mainstream life as well, if she’d had the opportunity. But the movie doesn’t depict her as an anti-heroic rebel; this isn’t the story of a down-on-her-luck woman becoming a badass through crime. The movie is too complex for that, its perspective too ambivalent. It’s not a noir-inflected tragedy of a woman first corrupted and then destroyed; but neither is it an empowering story of self-realization through determination. There are moments that flirt with both of those things, but the film charts a different path, one where we’re left to make what we will of Emily ourselves.
Aubrey Plaza is really fantastic in this role. I think it’s her best film performance. As excellent as the script is, Plaza elevates it by completely inhabitating the role. Her performance is incredibly naturalistic and minimal at times and, coupled with the low-fi, hand-held look of the film, there were moments when I almost forgot that I wasn’t just watching a documentary about a real woman getting swept up in this world. Plaza’s an actress that I always enjoy, but she certainly brings a lot of her own persona to a role most of the time; here, she really kind of disappears. It’s just a knock-out performance in every way. Gina Gershon is very good in a small one-scene cameo and Theo Rossi is excellent as the fraudster that gets Emily into crime; it’s an atypical performance – he’s charming, but in an affable, kind of dorky way and he’s ultimately kind of an actual sweetheart, less willing to put Emily in danger than she is herself.
I think some people are perhaps overselling the “thriller” elements of this movie; I wouldn’t recommend going into it looking for a lot of suspense or thrills, though there are a couple of scenes in that vein. It’s more a heavily thematic character study, a movie about the ways that life can go off the rails in our modern times and the everyday people that are impacted when that happens. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Aubrey Plaza’s magnificent performance elevates an already excellent script in this stripped-down character study about modern inequities & the paths a person takes to escape them. 4 stars.