Aubrey Plaza is grippingly driven in the late-stage capitalism crime thriller Emily the Criminal.
Crime thrillers love to insist that crime doesn’t pay, which is pretty rich, since staying on the straight and narrow isn’t exactly lucrative either. While so many of these glorified Old Testament cautionary tales posit dollar-signs-over-the-eyes greed as the motive for leaping into the choppy waters of illegal transgression, anyone just trying to get by in the rigged system of American capitalism might draw a different conclusion. Why play by the rules when the only way to win — or maybe even to survive — is to break them?
That’s the question mulled, early and often, by the title character of Emily the Criminal, an economical gig-economy noir from writer-director John Patton Ford. Emily (Aubrey Plaza, reliably and superbly barbed) is a few years out of college and buried in $75,000 of student debt. Early on, she makes a phone call to the loan office to find out why a recent payment isn’t reflected on her statement. Turns out it went entirely to the interest, not the principal. It’s a scene guaranteed to inspire mass shudders of traumatic recognition from an audience very familiar with the Sisyphean ordeal of paying back predatory lenders.
Emily, a graphic designer by training but not trade, has a couple of felonies on her record — youthful mistakes that brought her time at university to a close and left her largely unhirable. To make ends meet, she works long hours for little pay as an independent contractor at a catering company. Plaza has played more than her share of tough, testy, take-no-shit customers, but here she spikes her signature hostility with a sympathetic weariness: Facing a future dimmed by insurmountable financial obligation, Emily has hardened into a classic Aubrey Plaza antiheroine, with no savings and even fewer fucks left to give.
