The Public (Emilio Estevez, 2018): USA

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018.

Emilio Estevez’s the public was selected to present at the opening film night. It was a great experience to watch the film, which is basically about a group of homeless people who don’t want to leave Cincinnati public library because of the extreme weather and harsh condition. Also, the librarian Stuart, who was acted by Emilio Estevez himself decided to help them to “occupy” the public library. The movie talks about a lot of social issues such as homeless, inequality, journalism, social welfare system and races. Emilio Estevez is the director, actor and screenwriter of this movie at the same time. It was so impressive because he can balance them smoothly and we can see that he put a lot of efforts in this movie. “I’ve long admired Emilio Estevez as an artist-actor-director,” said Roger Durling, executive director of the SBIFF. Therefore, we can apparently see the reason why his movie was selected to perform at the opening night.

The movie starts with the view of downtown Cincinnati’s winter, a lot of people are waiting in front of the public library and ask the time when library will open, including a lot of homeless people. The wind is freezing upon everybody’s face and it was early in the morning, also the coldest time of the day. Some librarians is standing in front of the front gate to comfort people and also protect the gate. When the library is open, everybody just sneaks into it. Then the camera led us to the restroom, as we can see, there are a few homeless people came in to wash their face and brush their teeth, it is possible that the public library is the only public place that have free hot water and lights. More importantly, it is warm. There use of background music and settings showed how bad the weather is and how much difficulties that homeless people had in order to just survive. However, the authority of the library clearly don’t want these homeless people to stay in the public library, he asked the librarians and securities to ask them out, so the problem and conflict appears. In the middle of the movie, homeless people want to occupy the library after it is closed because it is still freezing outside and today is the coldest day ever. Out of some reasons, the librarian Stuart chose to help them against the authorities.

The public is definitely a master-level film, the narrative style is the classic Hollywood movie style, the shift of the actor’s attitude and the change of homeless people are the best part in this film. The major dramatic conflict here is between the people in the library, including those librarians and homeless people and the people outside of the library, including the city prosecutor and the police. There are a various of distinctive styles that are really impressive. For example, at the very beginning of the film, the music composer Tyler Bates chose to set up a modern hip hop music scene here, which is a really great and stylistic setting.

I personally really like this movie because it brings up a lot of social issues which still needed to be concerned and worked on in the public. We need to be more focus on the social welfare problems and avoid the society inequality.