I can’t help but feel like Blindspotting, now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD, was done a disservice by this trailer. It’s not that it’s the most egregious example of an advertisement misrepresenting a film ever, but the Three Billboards-ian “Issue Drama” promised by that trailer is really, really not the film that Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal wrote and starred in, and that Carlos López Estrada directed. “Ex-con in last days of parole grapples with what to do after seeing a police shooting” may be an easy logline, but Blindspotting is funnier, stranger, angrier, and more vibrant than the easy melodrama suggested by that premise.
Blindspotting depicts a few days in the life of Collin (Diggs) and his lifelong best friend Miles (Casal). Both men are proud natives of Oakland, CA, and as the film begins both are aghast at the tides of gentrification that are washing away the community they know and love and replacing it with wealthy white hipsters with no knowledge or interest in the town or its history. Miles wears his anger externally, lining his body with tattoos and covering his teeth with a grill, loudly declaring his antagonism to anyone in earshot. His insecurity as a white dude who associates strongly with a black community is as blatant as all that gold shit in his mouth.
For his part, Collin just wants to keep his head down and get through the last couple days of his parole. Diggs, an electric presence who shot to stardom thanks to his record-setting (look it up) skill with verse on Hamilton, keeps things tightly wound throughout much of the film’s early goings, bristling with concerns, rages, and longings that he feels the need to tamp down lest he make himself even more of a target.
There is a reason why Collin keeps such a tight grip on his emotions and reactions, and it’s the reason he ended up in jail in the first place. Diggs and Casal’s takes its time getting there, though, instead letting the story progress in what almost seem to be disconnected vignettes tied to Miles and Collin’s shared job as movers and their various escapades throughout the community. Miles is constantly hustling to make extra money to better provide for his wife Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones, the original “And Peggy!”), while Collin desperately wishes to earn his way back into the good graces of Val (Janina Gavankar) with whom he shares a heartbreak that only becomes clear as the film progresses.
The day-to-day life in Oakland is captured through a heightened lens of both language and imagery. The script may take the scenic drive in terms of plot, but words fly out of the screen at a mile a minute, never more so than when Miles is on his hustle. Casal and Diggs built the script around their own long friendship, and their ease with each other is never more evident than when the pair are machine-gunning verbiage off one another. Everyone the duo deal with is cut from similar larger-than-life cloth, the outsized personalities matched by Estrada’s dynamic framing and kinetic camera. Estrada came out of music videos, but unlike many who emerged from that scene, Estrada’s energetic visual approach serves rather than dominates his story. You’ll never be unaware of the camera, but its motion exacerbates and underlines the emotional charge of a given beat rather than distracting from it.
Many of those beats are hilarious ones, as Blindspotting is packed with jokes from its opening weed-fumigated banter to a scene in which Miles and a customer yap at such high velocity that neither man seems completely sure what has just been said. I have no doubt that if Blindspotting was ‘just’ a comedy, like a California-baked Clerks, the rapport between Diggs and Casal married to Estrada’s zippy visuals would be enough to make it one of the biggest laugh-getters of the year.
But Blindspotting has…well…other things going on. And while, yes, Collin witnessing a cop (Ethan Embry) gun down an unarmed black man late one night is the most attention-getting and ripped-from-the-headlines of the film’s dramatic moments, there are more, and they accumulate over the course of the film. Miles’ disgust with gentrification begins as a goofy, maybe even rousing for city slickers similarly frustrated by shifts in their own hometowns, running gag, but as the film progresses you see just how deep and true that rage is, how much it festers within him. Meanwhile, the subplot involving the police murder mostly evades any motion towards standard thriller forms, instead zeroing in on the lingering effects seeing that violence has on Collin.
While Estrada’s aesthetic often serves to blow Blindspotting up to almost cartoon proportions, the characters and world alike larger than life, he’s also able to pivot hard into scenes where it feels like you are trapped in a room with these people with no idea what’s coming and no way out. A later scene involves three terrified adults, a child, and a handgun, and it may be the most terrified I have ever been watching a movie in…God, I don’t even know how long.
All these frustrations and horrors mount and mount until you know an explosion has to be coming. It does, finally, in a scene I won’t even try to describe for fear the description may dull its impact. Suffice to say that in its final moments, Blindspotting hands the spotlight to Diggs and lets him finally unleash all the rage and terror we’ve watch accumulate in a manner that might have been laugh out loud funny in its wrongheadedness, but that instead becomes one of the great transcendent sequences in a movie in 2018. It’s a sequence where the tension ratchets up so high you feel like you can’t stand to keep watching, but what’s happening is so powerful you wouldn’t dare look away.
The Blu-ray is a handsome transfer, really bringing out the best in the bold colors and dynamic camerawork of cinematographer Robby Baumgartner. The disc comes loaded with a number of Making Of and a multiple commentary tracks, including one between Diggs and Casal that I am very eager to listen to.
It unfortunately seems like Blindspotting got a little lost in the shuffle this year, with other movies tackling themes of race and gentrification to greater attention and box office.
That’s a real shame, but I feel safe in assuming that Blindspotting is one that we will be talking about for years to come, especially as the creative team continues to branch out into Hollywood. It’s a fearless blast of both creativity and outrage, a potent combination that results in one of the very best films of the year. Go get it.