Emily the Criminal

Emily The Criminal presents a difficult contradiction for me to unravel, and as I start to write this, I'm not sure where I fall. Emily The Criminal is about, well, Emily. She's a millennial; she's facing a mountain of school loans for a college she didn't even finish. She's living with roommates, because she can't afford anything else. She's got a crap job as a catering delivery person because she has a prior criminal offense on her record that more or less closes the door on better opportunities. But she's also got some bitterness and entitlement, like the world owes her for all she's been through. It doesn't pass judgment on Emily for these things; they're just who she is. A co-worker gives her a connection to a guy who can help her make money fast; it turns out to be credit card fraud, buying things with fake cards and selling them on the black market. As the chance for money becomes greater but takes her further from her dreams (and gets more dangerous), Emily has to make a choice between the fast money that can solve her financial problems and a straight, but hard life. It would be reductive to say Emily The Criminal is just Millennial Breaking Bad, but it's not inaccurate to say that's where it starts. The themes that Emily explores are certainly comparable to Breaking Bad; an average person who falls into a crime because of life. Emily is, literally, one bad decision away from having been able to follow her dreams. The difference between Emily and Walter White is that the latter was driven, initially, by the ticking clock of impending mortality, and when that was avoided, it awakened something in him that had fallen by the wayside. It brought energy and excitement to his middle-class suburban life to become the meth kingpin of Albuquerque. Walter and Emily both started doing what they did out of desperation, but Walter continued it because he loved the rush and he didn't care about the consequences. Emily is getting no thrills from what she does. Crime is supposed to be a means to an end for her, and it keeps spiraling into something else. She's stuck in a loop. This reinforces the other major theme of Emily, that the system is built to keep young people in a state of perpetual servitude, and the system doesn't like to let people escape the loop. At her job, she's classified as an independent contractor, so she has none of the protections an employee or a member of a union might have. Better-paying jobs see her prior conviction as a permanent scarlet letter. The one opportunity she gets to get out of the loop, a job on her dream path, is an unpaid full time internship. The real world is brutal and vicious and not set up for the regular person to succeed. It's no wonder she turns to a life of crime, only to find out that opening that door was a trap door. The movie, rather deftly, never treats Emily as this unfortunate getting kicked around by an uncaring world; she has made mistakes that made her road in the spiral all the harder. It's that the world is making her forever pay for those mistakes that's the problem. It's not that Emily becomes a criminal; in the eyes of the system, her one brush with the law years ago forever paints her as one, no matter what she does, so it’s more a case of choosing to swim with the current instead of against it. The issue is, does this make for a good movie? That's tricky. What made Walter White's journey from downtrodden, cancer-stricken middle school teacher to drug lord entertaining was the absurdity of it. Walter's path was crazy. Emily's isn't. It feels believable. She doesn't get involved in some international crime family, she doesn't get on the radar of federal authorities, and her name isn't whispered with reverential fear. Emily is normal. Emily isn't a genius. Her story is, ultimately, a classic tragedy, a good person brought down by moral failings and misguided decisions. Tragedies make for good stories, but I found Emily The Criminal a bit hampered by being too close to reality. A happy ending would've been as fraudulent as the credit cards Emily uses, but knowing that she's digging her hole deeper and the system is dumping the dirt on her head, which mirrors real life (minus the crime) pretty accurately, it doesn't make for good escapism. It's realistic, it's raw, but if I wanted to be reminded that the economy sets up people in a doorless prison for which the only escape is death, I could just turn on the news ... and I don't watch the news, precisely so I can NOT be reminded of the bleakness outside my front door. I will give Emily The Criminal credit for not glamorizing the criminal life; the consequences of participating in it are painted with the same stark, unforgiving colors as straight life. But that goes back to my issue of this movie's unrelenting darkness.. The movie's commitment to realism is laudable, but it's hard to, you know, enjoy. That puts Emily The Criminal in that weird space where it's more admirable than entertaining. It's all very well done, from the nearly scoreless direction that lets the realness of the world carry the emotional weight, to Aubrey Plaza's excellent performance, probably her best. It's hard not to feel bad for Emily, even as she occasionally shoots herself in the foot. This is the kind of movie you watch for how well it's all done, not for the feeling it gives you. In that regard, it does what it does very, very well.