Sundance Review: Aubrey Plaza In ‘Emily The Criminal’
deadline.comIf Emily the Criminal had been made in the 1970s, it might have been an angry drama starring Jane Fonda. If it had been made in the ’80s, it would have been a feelgood comedy starring Dolly Parton.
And here we are in 2022, where it lands with its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival as a taut, gripping but nevertheless damning portrait of how much ground has been lost in the last 40 years.
The setting is America, but the subject is universal: the growth of wage slavery and, in particular, the glass ceiling that exists for people, women in particular, on low income.The title sounds like an edgy comedy, and Aubrey Plaza is no stranger to those, which might be the Trojan horse subterfuge director John Patton Ford is using.
Like this year’s U.S. Competition entry Emergency, it’s a genre film that actively deconstructs its genre, promising a risqué romp—a little bit like 2019’s stripper-con thriller Hustlers, which went surprisingly far then stopped disappointingly short to accommodate its mainstream audience—but quickly does a bait-and-switch to show the reality of how things would really go down if a woman tried to get by in a (bad) man’s world.Plaza plays Emily Benetto, a young woman struggling to make a living.
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