EMERGENCY starts with Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) attending a class called Blasphemy and Taboos, taught by a perky British woman who, after reminding her students that their syllabus contained a trigger warning about this class, confronts them with the n-word. Not just projecting it onto the classroom screen in huge letters, but saying it over and over again, and then asking them, the only people of color in the class, to weigh in on why it’s such a powerful epithet. They are two black faces in a sea of whiteness that is Buchanan College, and the different ways that they perceive that situation prepares us for what is to follow, starting with their discussion about why that one word is forbidden to white folks. There could be no better starting point for a film that is fearless in prompting discussion by looking directly at the dominant culture where race and class matter more, and in far more subtler ways, than it likes to admit.
Set on the night before spring break, it gives us those best friends on the cusp of their future. Sean is a would-be player putting off finishing his thesis while carrying a torch for his ex. Kunle is preppie-attired model student and son with a crush on blonde and socially conscious, Bianca (Gillian Rabin) and too much paternal feeling for his bacterial cultures. Sean is planning a legendary sweep of seven campus parties, complete with color-coded diagram, in order to assure his place in college history. Kunle is more focused on his bacterial cultures that he needs to nurture in order to keep his admission to the Ph.D. program at Princeton. What should be a night of frivolous excess and possible carnal delights instead turns into a nightmare where a series of increasingly desperate decisions by the friends and their socially inept, aspiring rocket scientist of a roommate, Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), put their futures, and perhaps their lives, at risk.
Writer K.D. Dávila slyly uses Goldilocks and the three bears as his framework. He takes the beloved fairy tale and tweaks the perspective by having Goldilocks be a semi-conscious and randomly spewing white chick (Maddie Nichols) that the three roommates find on their living room floor after she breaks in. Kunle is clear that they need to call 911. Sean is equally clear that three young men of color found by the authorities with a white girl in that condition will only lead to trouble for them. Bad trouble. Carlos vacillates, allowing the painless exposition necessary to allow Sean and Kunle to make equally compelling cases from perspectives that speak as much to the class distinctions between Sean and Kunle as they do to the implications of the racial optics. Rarely has white privilege been so starkly laid out with such dialectical precision, and even more rarely with such wit. It’s as razor sharp as the psychic pain the ci-mentioned privilege is inflicting on these three innocent bystanders wondering how to help without getting themselves prison terms or worse. Dávila plays to the absurdity of it all with a ferocious sense of humor and of outrage, and the definitive explanation about why referring to a coward as female genitalia is getting it exactly backwards.
The epic crawl envisioned by Sean becomes a desperate odyssey through the blindspots of people convinced that they are not just doing the right thing, but that they are above the racism, classicm, and sexism that they are evoking. By the time the three of them are stuck on a dark road with a busted taillight and an unconscious Goldilocks in the back seat, the hideous potential, and all too likely, consequences what that means is irrefutable.
This is so much more than an intellectual exercise or a screed against an unjust world. Dávila keeps the story personal, and it is all the more emotionally powerful as a result. Freed from the theoretical, the stakes become as high for the audience as for these sympathetic protagonists who are forced to deal with trouble not of their making, even as they keep making the situation worse because, and this is the key, it has become clear to them and to us that there is no other logical choice. And yet they still try to do right by Goldilocks as well as by themselves. Their moral centers are never in question. This comes down to a question of self-preservation. Plus, there is the ring of authenticity in the way these three spar with each other verbally that signals the sort of relationship that doesn’t allow a more sentimental way of expressing affection. Even when the sparring takes on a darker cast, it’s still coming from that same place. Credit the writing, but also credit Cyler, Watkins, and Chacon, who give performances that capture a full spectrum of experience that can make a swagger a front for pain, and goofiness an irresistible sweetness as we get to know them.
EMERGENCY is a whip-smart dissection of where we are as a society as we gamely move into the third decade of the 21st century. It, and we, come away after almost two hours of screwball comedy and social tragedy, wiser and not a little chastened about assumed absolutes and superficial perceptions.
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