Closing out on all the acclaimed movies from 2022 to make by "best of" list definitive, I watched these two movies near each other and think they make excellent complements you should watch while spending New Year's in your apartment because everyone you'd want to go to a party with has COVID, flu, or RSV.
They're a good match because they have a lot in common:
- Netflix prestige shows
- Featuring a main actor known for their comedy movies, but who are quite good at serious drama
- (If you are like me, you might even watch them anticipating a drama and be surprised at how serious the intro is.)
- An intense "no time to stop and think" flow of action/choices/plot
- Heavy handed display of modern tech and social trends - everyone uses smartphones constantly, there are viral videos and apps, etc.
- Follows characters on the margins of society, who want to reach for the top of the pyramid but due to past mistakes have trouble even getting their foot in the door, and therefore about the winner-takes-all modern economy.
- That "past mistake" in both movies is an "assault conviction 5 years ago."
But there they diverge. Hustle is the heart-warming uplifting one, because it's really a sports movie, the kind about being an underdog and having that miraculous win in the final minutes. I don't know the genre, what it lacks in surprise it more than makes up for being effective at evoking the emotions it wants you to feel.
It's interesting the way Hustle overcomes the dystopian marketplace. An idiot billionaire gets his comeuppance and the power of "personal connections to famous people" lets a lot of basketball stars cameo and proves "heart finds heart" or "for the love of the game" or some combination of the two.
As I said, it's about the margins of society - a Spanish construction worker who plays street courts, and is discovered by Adam Sandler (both movies have bearded, charismatic, high-energy men who inducts the neophyte into the demimonde.) In particular, Bo Cruz the basketball rookie labors under an assault conviction that is just at the margin where people can conceivably hire him if they are feeling generous, but have an easy reason to reject them if for any reason the employer wants to. In the emotional center of the movie, Bo admits that he got in an argument with his ex's boyfriend over who gets to keep his daughter that escalated to a fight.
It's a movie about forgiveness. It finds a crime people would actually be viscerally opposed to, but the most sympathetic circumstances for it, for an industry that is frequently plagued by assault-conviction-prone athletes. (Forgiveness when "this man will make me millions of dollars" is tricky ethical territory to try to get into, but that doesn't make "therefore NEVER forgive" the ideal answer.)
It all feels both "gritty" and heart-warming, which matches the showy shots of the scenes all happening in "real Philadelphia."
So then watch and contrast with Emily the Criminal, which watches a driven woman with college loans osmose from the world of temporary gig jobs to gig criminality.
There is a major emphasis in this movie on the way "playing by the rules" screws over most proletariat, especially ones who for any reason are even more marginal. Emily has an assault conviction on her record, and is tormented by HR managers who ask her about her past swearing they don't do a background check, and then when she doesn't fess up to it they reveal they DID do a background check, and now can reject her for her dishonesty. Her hours are toyed with by the caprice of gig-supervisors who mock her for not having the protections of real employment. She has $70,000 in loans to pay off (for an incomplete art degree) and her current payments don't even keep up with interest. She sees her friends who did get a decent career enjoying perks like a company trip to Portugal while she debates moving back in with her step-dad. And when she is offered a dream job... it turns out to be an internship with no pay. (That scene is particularly trenchant, with the employer saying she had it tough getting started too in order to justify not paying people, in a way that highlights how the problems between different generations are different, even if neither is strictly better.)
So getting screwed when playing by the rules, drives her to the criminal lifestyle, which is flowing so smoothly it's just like being a gig contractor.
(My one objection is that her non-degree is in painting. I know that it's to highlight the impossibility of her finding a stable career, but also it reinforces the idea that people who screwed by college loans and the economy are so because they chose frivolous majors. That's not true! People who got "business" degrees or went to professional school for whatever career was in low-demand that year (lawyers, pharmacists) found themselves just as underemployed when the market decided it didn't need any more of them right now.)
When I worked in campaign fundraising, we would just call random people on our list, tell them about our candidate, ask for a donation, and take their credit card number over the phone. And I was shocked this was how it worked since... once we had their number, we could do anything with it. They didn't even know we were a real campaign, ANYONE could call random people, say they were a good progressive campaign, ask for credit card numbers, and then steal thousands of dollars. I was just surprised to see the world work in such incautious way.
I told a friend this and he said "yeah, crime is actually easy, if you do it once. The risky part is that it's SO easy, and if you do it a lot then you will get caught."
That's Emily's arc through the criminal world. Ripping off a couple hundred dollars is amazingly easy. But the more she gets into it, the more her aggressive side comes out, and she takes increasing risks both for herself and the people around her.
This is when we see the flip side of "living by the rules is screwing you over" which is that living OUTSIDE the rules introduces many new risks. You can be cheated and violently attacked and there is no System to turn to for defense. Multiple times someone turns on her and says "what are you going to do, call the cops?" It takes a certain sort of personality to survive in this wild with no safety net of social order - and we delight in discovering that Emily has that sort of persevering persona.
At first as the audience we cheer on this girlboss, committing surprising acts of violence in defense of herself and "not letting anything stop her." But we realize like in Breaking Bad, Emily is not an innocent girl "forced" on this path - it comes very naturally to her and part of her wants it. She even eggs her mentor into going farther to take revenge than he can stomach.
And then near the end we get Emily's version of the scene where "she admits the nature of her assault conviction five years ago."
It was just a guy I was dating and we fought all the time. One day, I just... you know what my mistake really was though? I didn't go far enough. I didn't really scare him. You know, 'cause if I had, he would've never called the police.
And you know, I was just utterly charmed by the likable character's backstory revelation being "they actually did something pretty bad, and do not have a sympathetic reason or are deeply remorseful for it." It is not just that the gig economy has driven someone to desperation, but that this person was looking for a way to "break bad" themselves.
Unsurprisingly, Emily has a much less heartwarming conclusion than Hustle. See them both.
No comments:
Post a Comment