Blindspotting

“Blindspotting easily breaks the confines of Black and white binaries.”

Title: Blindspotting (2018)
Director: Carlos López Estrada 👨🏽🇲🇽🇺🇸
Writers: Rafael Casal 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Daveed Diggs 👨🏽🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Note: This review was commissioned by Lionsgate. The content and methodology remain 100% independent and in line with Mediaversity's non-commissioned reviews.

Technical: 4.5/5

If you squint at the components of Blindspotting, you might see how director Carlos López Estrada combines some familiar hooks: the culture clash of an interracial buddy comedy duo; an unvarnished look at gentrification in a predominantly Black neighborhood; a social thriller that keeps its audience tense and alert. But on top of this heady mix, Estrada layers vibrant colors, energetic camerawork, pitch-perfect comedic timing, plus moments of spoken word dialogue delivered by Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame. The bombastic sum total lends a unique perspective, one that Estrada ought to be fiercely proud of calling his directorial film debut.

With any experimentation though, and especially with the newness of a first-time feature, Blindspotting’s tonal shifts don’t always transition seamlessly. The spoken word segments sometimes stretch too long, and genres do jostle for space. (Comedy, drama, thriller, musical, and romance could all lay claim to different parts of the film.) But these quibbles feel minor in the face of such an exciting break from Hollywood’s usual drumbeat of derivative works.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Blindspotting focuses on the relationship between two male best friends, Collin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). Women do circulate in supporting roles, but they function primarily as moral compasses and audiences are never privy to their interior lives.

That said, the more mature of the two friends, Collin, refreshingly takes on some of the emotional labor required to deal with Miles’ spiraling. The invisible work that women often have to shoulder alone, seen in stories such as Creed II (2018) or The Father (2020) where mens’ messy lives are painstakingly ordered by the women around them, can be seen through Collin’s efforts to de-escalate the fights that Miles seems to pick wherever he goes. It’s not enough, however, and after repeated incidents that put Collin at risk of being hauled back to jail, the burden ultimately falls on Collin and Miles’ love interests to assume the unenviable roles as symbols of stability.

Miles’ girlfriend Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) takes the brunt of it, having to care for their son Ziggy (Sean 'Ziggy' Jones) on top of needing to babysit a grown-ass man. In Collin’s case, viewers piece together a backstory wherein he dated his coworker Val (Janina Gavankar) but had previously let her down in a big way, their onscreen relationship now tense and careful. While Val does thankfully have a life of her own, as we learn that she’d been able to prioritize her own mental health by refusing to visit Collin during his time in prison, the film still paints her with tropey brushstrokes: Against the backdrop of Collin and Miles’ boys-will-be-boys antics, she’s the voice of reason—or the buzzkill, if audiences are to interpret her disdain for Miles with less forgiveness. That she has to be the reasonable adult, begrudgingly tasked to straighten out her man, feels like a rote plot device that does little to challenge how women are expected to put in more than their share of invisible work during romantic relationships with men.

Race: 5/5

Blindspotting handles topics of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomics with the confidence of lived experience. It’s crystal clear that screenwriters Diggs and Casal—who double as the film’s lead actors and who grew up in the East Bay together—understand the world they’ve crafted, one that’s set in old school Oakland as it traverses the chaos of gentrification.

Throughout Collin and Miles’ journey, intersections of skin color and class twist and combine with realistic fluidity. In an early scene, Miles’ gun dealer wraps up their transaction by clocking back into Uber, since he doubles as a driver for the gig economy. At their local bodega, dingy cigarettes are paid for next to a brightly lit mini-fridge selling expensive green kale juice. (Much to Miles’ derision, Collin coughs up the cash so that he may later drink it in front of the health-conscious Val, as he attempts to show he’s turned over a new leaf.)

On top of this socioeconomic anxiety, Blindspotting showcases how two men with similar upbringings deal with completely different circumstances based solely on how they’re perceived to the outer world. For example, despite Collin or Miles winding up in the same sidewalk brawls, it’s Collin who gets arrested thanks in no small part to systemic racism. Yet for Miles, we eventually learn that the enormous chip on his shoulder comes from being a white man who identifies with Oakland’s working class community, but whose whiteness is consistently used to assign him as “other.” Casal’s own background as a white Hispanic man of Spanish descent, whose family immigrated to the United States from Cuba, lends credence to the role given such airtight parallels.

Best of all, Blindspotting never resorts to making false equivalencies between the challenges facing the two friends. In a sign of true authenticity, the filmmakers approach racial identity with surgical precision, attuned to all the above complications in the crafting of their characters. Scalpel in hand, Blindspotting showcases race relations from a multicultural perspective, one that easily breaks the confines of Black and white binaries.

If only more films could show the world with all its diversity intact. Thankfully, Blindspotting helps tip the balance as it celebrates Oakland for what it is: a city where Val (played by multiracial actor Gavankar, child of Indian immigrants) can date Collin (Diggs, biracial Black and Jewish) who’s best friends with Miles (Casal, white Hispanic) who shares his home life with Ashley (biracial Black and white) and their child. The breadth of different ethnicities in major, supporting, and minor roles—and the specific ways they interact with each other based on racial and socioeconomic markers—all ring true to the East Bay, clear as a bell.

Mediaversity Grade: B 4.17/5

Blindspotting escapes easy definition, but one thing is sure: It reaches through the screen and shakes viewers to the truth that reality is messy, but therein lies the beauty. The film does take shortcuts when writing its women, but seldom do we get to see the growing pains of a gentrifying city like Oakland portrayed with such nuance. Estrada, Casal, and Diggs carefully tender that situation for outsiders, and we’re all the luckier for it.

Like Blindspotting? Try these other titles set in the San Francisco-Oakland area.

Grade: BLiJuly 27, 2018Great for: Race