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Emily the Criminal

 It seems strange to recommend "Emily the Criminal" in this holiday season. This is a brutal movie about a Hobbesean world; a young woman (Emily) loses her power after a felony conviction, and she has to fight to stay afloat. She works for UberEats (or something like this) in an attempt to pay off her student loans.


A colleague alerts her to an opportunity. If you purchase a TV with a stolen credit card, various thugs will reward you with cash. You just need to breathe deeply and wear a poker face. Emily is tough and smart, and she performs her new work without seeming to sweat. But the tasks get dicier. In one upsetting scene, a buyer follows her to her front door, then assaults her on the carpet. He steals everything from her; he holds a knife to her throat and says, "Remember, I know where you live."

Amazingly, Emily dusts herself off, grabs her taser, and follows her assailant to his car. She strikes him, grabs her stuff, looks through various wallets, and reads an address out loud. "422 Parker Street. Remember, I know where you live."

This movie is clearly an indictment of capitalism. Punks do terrible things to one another, but their behavior isn't really "more offensive" than the things that people in suits choose to do. In the opening, a bigwig asks Emily to describe her criminal record. When she becomes evasive, the bigwig reveals that he actually knows all the details, and he was really just creating a kind of behavioral test. Understandably, Emily asks, "How could you do that?" And the guy shrugs. Just a tactic. Later, a high-powered Gina Gershon forgets to mention that the interviewee of her dreams would be willing to accept an unpaid internship. Emily fights back--and her valid objections go nowhere. Gershon just says, irrelevantly, "There is a great deal of competition for this internship...."

I mentioned that this might not seem like a Christmas movie, but there is real joy here, as well. The joy is in watching Aubrey Plaza make use of her own talent. It's like seeing Lorrie Moore, on the page, in "Self-Help"; a young artist, an actual artist, is "reaching take-off." That's a rare thing--so rare, it's worth singing about. It's a privilege to be in the audience.
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