Aubrey Plaza, the queen of weaponized deadpan, plays it all-the-way straight in Emily the Criminal, a difficult little first feature by writer-director John Patton Ford. The film includes a topical spin-it's occur the field of crushing student loan debt-but it is concerning the shapeshifting nature of hopes and dreams, and the ways that the riptides of life can carry us away in unexpected and sometimes alarming directions.
Plaza's character, Emily, is really a young woman who made the error of following her very own dreams into art school, which has left her $70,000 indebted with little hope of getting a decent job in the real world. (She also has a small rap sheet that's blocking her future just like a boulder within the road.) So she now humps orders for a food delivery service, her lifetime going nowhere.
Then, tipped with a colleague, Emily falls along with an improbably charming Lebanese immigrant named Youcef (Theo Rossi, of Sons of Anarchy), who's a part of a criminal enterprise dedicated to charge card fraud-stamping stolen names and numbers onto plastic blanks for a squad of \”dummy shoppers\” to use in scamming retailers from pricey merchandise. Youcef offers Emily an opportunity to create a quick $200 doing one of these runs. \”You will not be in danger,\” he tells her, \”but you'll be breaking the law.\” Emily is in-and she happens to be proficient at these items. Then she's offered a follow-up assignment-a riskier one, but for a lot more money.
Emily has mixed feelings relating to this new job path, however they are easily overcome following a dispiriting interview for a legitimate gig at a slick advertising agency. This could happen to be a perfect berth for an art-school grad, but her hopes were instantly deflated when the agency's owner (Gina Gershon) explained the job was intern-level and the pay, zero. (Great resumé-builder, though.) Emily-whose endless loan payments appear to be entirely consumed by ever-mushrooming interest charges-is deeply steamed. \”People just keep taking of your stuff,\” she fumes, \”until you make the goddamn rules yourself.\” She decides to begin using this crime career she's wandered into a a bit more seriously.
Plaza isn't an assertively expressive actor (it's part of her effectiveness as a comic presence), but she turns Emily into a completely realized character-a woman who's found not a way to exert control over her life until she's in contact with her inner badass. \”We're serious people!\” she shouts at one cowed civilian. \”You should panic people!\”
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