Getting crime to pay

We haven't seen much that's been particularly inspiring at the Michigan Theater in recent days, when we've been seeing things at all. Yesterday's offering was also not something that would have ordinarily jumped out at me, but when faced with few or no choices, you take what's there. That, of course, is also one of the central themes of Emily the Criminal. The film is the first feature-length effort as either writer or director for John Patton Ford and it's a pretty solid starting point if he's choosing to make a career out of this whole cinematic thing. The choice of career is also the quandary of the central character of the story, Emily, played by Aubrey Plaza, formerly of comedic fame in stand-up and Parks and Recreation. It's a story about contemporary LA, the economic difficulties faced by much of the modern generation, and the sacrifices one is willing to or is forced to make to overcome those difficulties. It's a pretty straightforward scenario, as Emily, an artist weighed down with tens of thousands in student debt, gets a tip from a co-worker that leads her to a credit card fraud scheme that brings immediate, albeit risky, returns. Seeing it first as an amusing distraction and then later as a real opportunity for cash, she gets in deep with both the scheme and its co-owner, Youcef (Theo Rossi.) We can see where this is going a long time before it gets there.

Emily is a fully-realized character and Plaza plays her well. It's not difficult to either believe or understand why a woman with a history of impulsive behavior and unwise choices might choose to participate in the venture. Those poor choices also persist and make her life more difficult than it already is, which is saying something, even if she's not immediately impoverished as so many others in our society are. The film is also rather pointed with its social commentary, not only in reference to the obvious things like the onerous weight of student loans that accumulate interest faster than payments can reduce the original amount, but also to the social disdain that people Emily might once have considered peers express toward her and her co-workers as they bring food to company gatherings. It does get a bit heavy-handed in spots, like when her boss points out that she's an independent contractor and, therefore, has no ground to stand on when he reduces her hours. He points out that she can't go complain to the shop steward because she's an IC. I'm not sure how many people that might watch the film even know what a shop steward is, given the reduction in organized labor in this country, so pointing out that she, like so many other workers, simply has no rights was probably sufficient. In the end, Emily continues to make what she feels are the only reasonable choices available to her and we begin to realize that her situation is not too far from a certain irascible chemistry teacher,,,

After we got home from the film, we sat down to watch the final episode of Better Call Saul. I have often said that The Wire is the best thing ever put on TV, but that Breaking Bad is a very close second. BCS has been very close to its progenitor in quality and not simply because it takes place within the same setting and involves many of the same characters. Unlike BB, where showrunner, Vince Gilligan, went into it with the idea that he was going to tell the story of a lead character who becomes a lead villain in the audience's eyes, I think his approach to Saul, along with co-runner, Peter Gould, was a bit more textured. Since it was a prequel, the act of building drama is sometimes more complicated, especially in a post-Game of Thrones world, where you know that anything life-threatening to lead characters that have appeared in later times isn't actually that dire. That doesn't keep the story from being interesting. It just means that you have to use different approaches to keep the audience really riveted to what might happen to our (anti)hero.

But I think the other advantage that Saul/Jimmy as a character had is that, unlike the force of nature that Walter White became, Jimmy often remained sympathetic even while he was engaging in acts that ranged from petty to downright awful. Sure, he was Slippin' Jimmy, scamming people out of their money because he couldn't be bothered to earn an honest living. But he was also James McGill, partner to Kim Wexler (the truly excellent and underrated Rhea Seehorn) and showed a genuine concern for the well-being of others, even if it only sometimes appeared when he realized that what he'd done had real consequences for others. He'd go through his period of recrimination and anguish and self-doubt... and then he'd be right back at it because that's who he was. In a genuinely impressive summation, all of those themes came to the fore in this final episode, including the acknowledgment that he was, even after all he'd done, still a really likeable guy, as displayed by the respect and affection shown by the other inmates in his final destination. Like Emily, I think Jimmy was a fully-realized character; an actual human being with all of the foibles and bad choices and sentimental strengths and failings that inhabit all of us, to one degree or another. That made the series eminently watchable and sets a very high bar for any storyteller to aspire to. Whether it pays off or not, the pursuit of the goal may be the most important thing.