Written and Directed by Leah McKendrick | 118 min | ▲▲▲ | Netflix
Jill (Zoey Deutch) is a Texan who wants to be a chef. Her dreams take her to San Francisco, to the kitchen of the wildly demanding Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman going big). She suffers there, but survives by calling her sister, Izzy (Ciara Bravo), on the regular — Izzy’s been struggling with cystic fibrosis since she was little, and lives vicariously through Jill’s adventures and misadventures. Sadly, Izzy dies, but Jill keeps calling her number to leave messages as a kind of therapy. Her number is reassigned to a dude in Austin, Wes (Nick Robinson), who figures out what’s going on and gets a crush on this lady in SF. Inspired by her humour, he figures out a way to meet her.
Of course, he doesn’t tell her he’s been getting all the voicemails Jill left for her sister. You think that’s going to a problem later, say, right around the end of the second act?
What works best here, far and away, is Deutch. Having grown up in the 1980s I was naturally a big fan of her mom, Lea Thompson, and you can see a lot of her mother in Deutch. If anything, she might have more range — fabulous comic timing, check, but also an ability to shift gears and deliver the feels. Her handling of this wordy script, and the best gags therein, is what makes the movie worth watching at all.
And the movie delivers the romcom tropes that people love about romcoms, no doubt. There’s nothing here that’s dismantling any cliches, but it’s lively enough to sit through, even though almost two hours is too long for any movie in this genre. I did like that despite this being mostly shot in Vancouver, they had enough of a San Francisco unit to provide genuine location flavour. The exception being a couple of painfully obvious in-studio scenes supposedly on a bench overlooking the Golden Gate.
What also works are the clever references in the script to other genre films, a satisfying undercurrent of meta.
And here’s a few things the movie really gets wrong. One is the idea that if a cell number has been reallocated, the voicemail wouldn’t change, or would still be accessible. That’s really hard to believe. Worse is the scene, pretty early on, when Jill sleeps with a hunky dating podcaster (Toby Sandeman) who subsequently ghosts her. She shows up at a live taping of one of his pods and challenges him about his bad behaviour, earning a round of applause from the women gathered. I know how cynical this sounds, but I’m sure if they were really fans of this dude they would’ve turned on Jill for challenging him.
Finally, I know that the male lead is a lot less important than the female lead, and Nick Robinson is blandly good looking and unthreatening as he needs to be. Sure would be great if he was genuinely interesting with a personality beyond, “nice guy” and closet nerd (which he shares during a single scene).
But all of those bumps are easy to overlook. What the movie does is meet the demands for sentiment around the story’s exploration of grief, but at its core this is a romcom. Romcoms are about wish fulfillment. There’s no point in complaining about predictability, so you’ve got to hope more things work than feel stale or repetitive. The balance toward entertainment and novelty tilts in the right direction with Voicemails for Isabelle largely due to the winning charm of the leading lady.
