You think you know what you’re in for when you hear about an Aubrey Plaza movie called Emily the Criminal. It’s easy to imagine plugging the typical Plaza persona – the anti-social smartass who suffers no fools – into the world of crime, where her bone-dry wit would, say, intimidate her peers and disarm the powerful.
That movie might be fun, but Emily the Criminal is not that film at all. It’s a straight-up crime thriller, closer to Thief than Big Deal on Madonna Street, done with no winks, and Plaza plays it right down the middle. What seems at first like novelty casting ultimately, and delightfully, reveals itself as a good actor trying something new, recalibrating her gifts, taking on a genre movie without condescending to it. She’s very, very good, a little bit dangerous and a little bit desperate (and that’s the right mix for this story), hard-bitten, believably tough, and sexy as hell.
Yet what’s ingenious about her casting is that, even when she’s played prickly characters, she’s a fundamentally likable presence – and that’s a necessity when we’re following someone into the criminal underworld. We’re with her right from the top, from the opening sequence, a humiliating job interview in which a prospective employer tricks her into lying about her background. And she’s inclined to do so; she’s got $70,000 in student loan debt, and spends her days fielding calls from creditors while humping it out as a gig worker for a catering service.
One day, one of Emily’s co-workers does her a solid, giving her a number to text for some quick, easy money. The job is as a “dummy shopper,” using credit cards created from stolen information to purchase expensive merchandise, and when she arrives for what amounts to an orientation, she’s suspicious – this is not, to put it delicately, her typical crowd. “In the next hour you will make $200,” announces Youcef (Theo Rossi), who appears to run the show, “But you’ll have to do something illegal.” She’s handed a forged credit card and driver’s license, sent into a big box store to buy a pricey TV.
We’re already immersed in one of the best qualities of crime fiction: laying out how this stuff works. Once we understand the formalities and logistics, we become accomplices to Emily’s crimes, and it speaks to both the empathy of Plaza’s performance and the skill of writer/director John Patton Ford that they can build suspense into a few simple but elegant shots of our protagonist standing at a checkout, waiting for the credit card to clear. That job accomplished, she’s offered another one the next day, greater risk for more money. Conveniently enough, she has a pretty terrible day at her “real” job, and with that, we’re off and running.
Much of what follows is genuinely harrowing, and Plaza provides a rooting interest; even when she’s breaking the law, we want her to get over, which is incalculably important to the success of a film like this. She proves adept at thinking her way out of tough spots, but there are moments of real, scary, physical danger, and in those scenes, Plaza’s vulnerability matters (and Ford is an adroit enough director to know when to keep his camera on her, especially after her necessary bravado can dissipate).
But she finds, perhaps to her surprise, that she’s not only good at this work – she enjoys it. Early on, after showing her the ropes, Youcef tells her to keep anything she makes under $5K; she asks, “Ok, what if I make more?”
“If you make more?” he responds, slightly but playfully incredulous.
“Yeah,” she replies, and compliments it with a little smile, because it’s fun to be bad. That fun sustains the narrative for a while, but Ford’s smart script is a case study in quietly, constantly ratcheting up the stakes, all while sneaking in a decent dose of social (and economic) commentary. It sort of goes without saying, but it’s clear that, as a pretty white girl, Emily has an advantage in these in-store situations over the other folks in that first orientation, but that privilege only takes her so far. The running thread that undergirds the events is that Emily was, clearly, just one bad choice from shipwrecking her entire life, and the poverty of her available options is made crystal clear in a single but effective scene late in the picture, featuring the always welcome Gina Gershon as a potential boss at a “real job” who, of course, expects Emily to start as an unpaid intern.
Emily the Criminal truly comes into focus in its handling of that scene – a tightly woven explainer of a generation’s frustrations and anger, of the feeling that the deck is perpetually stacked against them. “Motherfuckers will just keep taking from you and taking from you until you make the goddamn rules yourself,” Emily later explodes. “That’s what this is about. Am I wrong?” And when she decides to take something back, in spite of the risk, it’s genuinely involving; we’re with her, and scared for her, because the movie has been so evenly keeled that this thing could go either way. She has a real “how did I get here” moment near the picture’s end, and Plaza doesn’t overplay it; she lets the emotions of the sequence wash over her, and work her over. Plaza is one of the producers of the film, and she knows what she’s doing; it feels like we’re being reintroduced to her, and what she can do. 
A
“Emily the Criminal” is out Friday in limited release.
