LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP is paradoxical. The person who knows you best can also cause the most pain. Another layer of complexity emerges when one party wants to change their life while the other remains fixed on how things used to be. Spend an evening with high school buddies who haven’t seen each other for 20 years, and you’ll see that unresolved parts of our character tend to appear when old friendships spark off each other.
The utterly thrilling Blindspotting, a likely candidate for both the best and most important film of the year, dramatizes friendship as central to being human, with the unresolved dimensions of wider social relationships the main challenge we face to be happy in this life and to have a life at all. It’s a brilliant examination of one of the smallest facts of life—boy meets boy—and one of the largest: Since your people persecuted my people, how can we ever become the same people?
The plot is simple: A guy has three days before his probation ends, so he must avoid even the hint of trouble. It doesn’t work out, of course. But what sounds like a macho thriller manages to enhance a new genre: seriocomic social commentary—funny, smart, terrifying, humane. Like Get Out, this is not a thrill ride for its own sake but a confrontation with abusive power and a naming of evil. It goes further to allow for the possible redemption of the evildoer.
Directed by Carlos López Estrada and written by co-stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, Blindspotting is a remarkable debut film, with gripping kinetic energy and authentic sense of space. This place feels real, both in its cultural context (evolving notions of masculinity, the empowerment of women, criminal justice disparities, police brutality, and racial distancing) and its physical location of Oakland, Calif., which Estrada conveys as a kind of hybrid chessboard/grungy theme park, the characters sometimes pawns, sometimes players.
This friendship between a black guy and a white guy, loyal beyond limits that most of us will never face, also reveals the experiment that we’re all invited into: learning how to serve the common good, acknowledging unearned power, and moving beyond reactivity to other people’s behavior toward practicing a better way of being. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and contempt for our enemies just fuels the sickness of a culture based on scapegoating. Blindspotting knows this and tells it like our lives depend on it.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and storyteller based in North Carolina. He is the founder of www.moviesandmeaning.com, and you can also find him at www.garethhiggins.net.
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