Trouble is brewing in Oakland, California. Two weeks ago Annapurna Pictures released the surreal, satirical Sorry to Bother You, shot on the streets of Oakland last summer by rapper turned filmmaker Boots Riley. The movie begins as a simple workplace comedy along the lines of Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) but ripens into a nightmare of capitalist exploitation. If that doesn’t shake you up enough, this week Summit Entertainment opens Carlos López Estrada’s bitterly funny drama Blindspotting, which was filming in Oakland at the same time as Sorry to Bother You. A cri de coeur against police violence, Blindspotting also finds time to probe the open wound of the city’s ongoing gentrification, as poor people of color are displaced by middle-class whites from the Pacific Northwest and gilded San Francisco across the bay. Like many other contemporary movies, these two knockouts examine the divide between black and white in America; like very few others, they remind us that the deeper dividing line is green.
Cassius’s dilemma may not be particularly fresh—British filmmaker Ken Loach has been telling stories like this for decades—but Riley isn’t afraid to push the class warfare to wild extremes. As a power caller, Cassius is assigned to WorryFree, Inc., an innovative new company that offers workers lifetime labor contracts in exchange for free room, board, and medical treatment. WorryFree is the brainchild of tall, handsome Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), author of the best-selling book I’m Still on Top!; in a TV interview, he flashes a million-dollar grin at the news that WorryFree has been cleared by a congressional committee that’s investigating slave labor. Pulled into Lift’s magic circle, Cassius attends a swank party where the overbearing host orders him to rap for the assembled white guests. A beat kicks up on the sound system, and Cassius stands alone on a staircase, fumbling for words. Finally he blurts out a string of racial slurs; to his dismay, the guests repeat his chorus.
Movies about race in America are seldom in short supply, but rarely do they venture past the realm of personal prejudice into the more complicated terrain of economic racism. A notable exception last year was Dee Rees’s period drama Mudbound, about a dirt-poor white family in the postwar south that can survive only by exploiting the black family down the road, but this Netflix production screened in theaters only long enough to qualify for Oscar consideration. Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You, in their sheer brilliance and ferocity, reverse this trend with their multiracial stories about people trapped at the bottom of the ladder. In fact they’re both delighted to bother us, and we need more movies like them. v
Blindspotting ★★★★ Directed by Carlos López Estrada. R, 95 min.
