If there was ever a film that demanded to be seen by as many people as possible, it would be Blindspotting, the absolutely ferocious debut from director Carlos Lopez Estrada and the supremely talented writing and acting team of Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, who have teamed up to create something strikingly alive and volatile, filled with a sense of vitality that speaks to our current shared societal landscape.
Blindspotting opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and received a limited theatrical release last summer, and is now available for purchase/rent via Blu-ray/DVD and various streaming providers. I can think of few other recent movies that feel as essential as this one does, and it saddens me to think that the people who REALLY WOULD BENEFIT from seeing a film of this magnitude will likely never view it.
Cult status is waiting just around the corner for this explosive and confident tonal mix of drama, comedy, social messaging, and suspense; it’s one of the most provocative items of the year.
Starring Diggs and Casal as two best friends who have learned to navigate the rough and tough streets of Oakland, only to see recent gentrification upend what they hold near and dear to the scrappy hearts, the narrative pivots on Diggs’ character, who when we first meet him, is three days shy of completing probation which stemmed from an incident in his past (I’d not dare spoil the sequence where his backstory is revealed, because it’s the best scene in any movie that I’ve seen all year). His life changes drastically when he witnesses a white cop shoot and kill an unarmed black man during a nighttime foot chase.
Meanwhile, Casal is an unhinged force of nature in this movie, playing a completely unpredictable person who threatens to screw up the lives of everyone around him, even though, at heart, he’s a good person who wants to do right. They work together as movers while trying to keep their home and romantic lives moving in a positive direction. But nothing comes easy in the world that Blindspotting presents.
I’m not surprised to learn that Casal and Diggs are childhood friends in real life, and that their project was a years-long labor of love that frequently changed due to how Oakland was morphing around them.
This is an angry piece of work with an aggressive voice, and what it says about race relations, our use of language and how people of all colors speak to one another, guns and how they figure into everyday life, and what our expectations have become based on how we perceive each other, is important and smart and when taken fully into context, rather illuminating.
Review by Nick Clement
Summary
Estrada’s stylish direction is aided immensely by Robby Baumgartner’s energetic cinematography and Gabriel Fleming’s snappy editing, while the hip-hop dominated soundtrack is appropriately scene-setting. This movie smacked me in the face – HARD – and I think it has the POWER to do that for many viewers. When there’s an item that’s this intelligent and well-crafted, you could only hope that it will eventually find the audience it fully deserves.
