A moving experience on many levels.
Blindspotting
Grade: A-
Director: Carlos Lopez Estrada
Screenplay: Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs (Jefferson and Lafayette in Hamilton on Broadway)
Cast: Diggs (Wonder), Casal
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 35 min
by John DeSando
Collin (Daveed Diggs) faces the last three days of his probation and his turbulent relationship with his volatile buddy, Miles (Rafael Casal). In Blindspotting (a term use to describe one’s being ignorant of stereotypes), everyone is in transition, beginning with Collin and ending with the city of Oakland, which must deal with the dynamics of gentrification while it continues struggling with racism on almost every front.
More like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and less like Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, this exciting comedy/drama catches the cultural complexity of a dynamic urban setting without despairing over the constant economic and racial setbacks. That the buddies are white and black and regularly reviewing their racial makeup (watch them dash around the use of “nigger”) adds a figurative layer debut director Carlos Lopez Estrada handles deftly and almost unobtrusively.
As Collin avoids being associated with a gun in his last probation days so Miles buys one for protection, leading to challenges with their friendship and the Oakland Police Department. The dramatic tension parallels the tense transition of neighborhoods as they gentrify and lead the players to question their own and their neighborhoods’ identity.
Both young men are movers of furniture and the like during the day, linking them to the central change motif. As the film exploits Diggs’s facility with hip-hop, it is able to catch the poetic nature of the changes while forging a relationship with reality.
Thus the art and the reality intersect in a far more elegant process than might be expected. It sings in hip-hop about diversity, while it deals with the reality of a white cop murdering a black 26 year old.
For a time as tumultuous as ours, Blindspotting is more powerful about change than all the editorials in the finest liberal tomes of our times.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
