Film Overview: ‘Emily the Felony’

Aubrey Plaza, the queen of weaponized deadpan, performs it all-the-way straight in Emily the Felony, a troublesome little first characteristic by writer-director John Patton Ford. The film has a topical spin—it is set on this planet of crushing scholar mortgage debt—however it’s actually concerning the shapeshifting nature of hopes and goals, and the methods through which the riptides of life can carry us away in sudden and generally alarming instructions.

Plaza’s character, Emily, is a younger lady who made the error of following her personal goals into artwork college, which has left her $70,000 in debt and with little hope of getting an honest job in the actual world. (She additionally has a minor rap sheet that is blocking her future like a boulder within the street.) So she now humps orders for a meals supply service, her life going nowhere.

Then, tipped by a colleague, Emily falls in with an improbably charming Lebanese immigrant named Youcef (Theo Rossi, of Sons of Anarchy), who’s a part of a prison enterprise dedicated to bank card fraud—stamping stolen names and numbers onto plastic blanks for a squad of “dummy buyers” to make use of in scamming retailers out of expensive merchandise. Youcef gives Emily an opportunity to make a fast $200 doing certainly one of these runs. “You will not be at risk,” he tells her, “however you’ll be breaking the regulation.” Emily is in—and she or he seems to be good at these things. Then she’s provided a follow-up project—a riskier one, however for lots more cash.

Emily has blended emotions about this new profession path, however they’re simply overcome after a dispiriting interview for a official gig at a slick promoting company. This may have been an ideal berth for an art-school grad, however her hopes had been immediately deflated when the company’s proprietor (Gina Gershon) defined that the job was intern-level and the pay, zero. (Nice resumé-builder, although.) Emily—whose infinite mortgage funds appear to be totally consumed by ever-mushrooming curiosity prices—is deeply steamed. “Folks simply maintain taking from you,” she fumes, “till you make the goddamn guidelines your self.” She decides to begin taking this crime profession she’s wandered into slightly extra severely.

Plaza is just not an assertively expressive actor (it is a part of her effectiveness as a comic book presence), however she turns Emily into a totally realized character—a girl who’s discovered no strategy to exert management over her life till she will get in contact together with her inside badass. “We’re severe individuals!” she shouts at one cowed civilian. “You ought to be petrified of us!”