This is not the most important thing you will read today....I certainly hope not anyway. This is not about the social-political chaos that is our world right now. This is not unfiltered thoughts about motherhood, or middle age, or anything like that.
This has (probably) no lasting importance for anyone but me, and I'm probably not going to submit my review anywhere but here. So if you're reading this consider yourself part of an exclusive club. You didn't ask for this, but here we are.
I just watched Voicemails for Isabelle and I can't move on until I rant about it. If you loved this movie with your whole heart....I truly apologize for what I am about to do and am giving you fair warning to back out now before I ruin your day with my negative review.
*Takes a deep breath*
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.
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Did we all watch the same movie? Or did some of us just watch the trailer and make up a movie in our head? Because the movie I was expecting after the trailer was much different than the movie I got.
The trailer portrayed all of the hallmarks of a classic 90s rom-com: The Meet-Cute, the Misunderstanding, the Grand Gesture. This led me to believe I would watch the movie and get the same warm-fuzzy vibes I get every time I watch You've Got Mail. They literally told me in the trailer that that's what they were going for. That is a bold claim. If the movie had fleshed out the trailer a little more and followed the same storytelling pacing I probably would have liked it.
The trailer LIED. Allow me to highlight the MANY glaring differences between the two movies.
Keep in mind that You've Got Mail is one of my all-time favorite movies.
First, the characters:
Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail is an independent business owner with a passion for books and storytelling and connections with her community who is a genuinely kind human being. Is she perfect? No. She makes judgments based on her fears and she engages in an emotional affair with an unknown person online while dating someone else.
But she is likable because of the way she treats other people. She has friends and a community she cares about. She has integrity with herself. Eventually she and her boyfriend come to a place of honesty with each other when they say this isn't working for us but we'll end on friendly terms. Even in her hatred of Joe Fox, when she acts out of alignment with her value system she owns it and repents.
Jill in Voicemails for Isabelle is a struggling assistant chef in the big city with a verbally abusive boss. Why did she move to San Francisco to be a chef? Unclear. She has nobody there, nothing but a dead-end job. Everyone she cares about lives in Texas.
Her whole character is defined by living for her sister who has Cystic Fibrosis and dies early on in the movie. She is sassy and abrasive for no reason and sleeps with literally any guy she goes on a date with. She is boy-sober for all of 2 seconds before starting a relationship with a guy she just meets and then almost sleeping with him and then flying back to Texas to be his plus one at a wedding.
She has known this guy for EXACTLY two weeks. Unlike Kathleen...she does not take ownership of any of her crap. She is who she is and you can accept it or not. Which...fine, I guess. And she does some legitimately kind things in the movie, trying to recreate Wes' mother's dish, trying to help her co-worker, entertaining her sister...but it doesn't seem to land as something that is a genuine part of herself so much as she's trying to get something out of it for herself: One night stand, clout at her job, holding onto her relationship with her sister because she needs her. I needed to see these moments of kindness apart from anything else in order for it to be believable.
Joe Fox:
A successful businessman who comes from a family of questionable morals. In spite of that he has somehow managed to acquire some of his own. He intentionally pours into the children of his father and grandfather's flings and makes sure they are loved by at least one stable adult in their lives. He is kind and courteous even to people who are actively hostile towards him.
He is also not perfect. He has tunnel vision in regards to his business and ends up hurting people as a result. However, when he realizes how his actions have hurt people he takes ownership of his mistakes and works to make amends. While he doesn't tell the whole truth at first in his correspondence with Kathleen, he is very intentional about not saying something that is untrue.
Wes:
A real-estate agent whose mother died. He has a very unhinged girlfriend at the start of the movie. He has nice southern manners, but really that is all we know about him. That and he has a friend who is a semi-cousin because their moms were BFFs. That's it. That's his whole character.
He gets a new work phone whose number USED to be Isabelle's and he starts receiving voicemails from this random girl living in San Francisco and as a result "falls in love with her" and decides to go find her in San Francisco.
EDIT: Oh wait. We also know that he has a history of asking his work friend to make sketchy technology hacks for his career so...there's also that.
......
The Meet
Wes and Jill meet because he listens to her grief-processing voicemails, learns where her frequent hangouts are, finds her, sits down, starts a conversation and a two week relationship all the time knowing things about her that she hasn't told him and which he has no right to know.
Now...isn't that the same as You've Got Mail?
No, my dear sweet sibling, it is not.
The quality of difference is that Jill is sending voicemails that are basically just streams-of-consciousness to her dead sister Isabelle. Kathleen is sending EMAILS (which she thinks about, writes, and edits) to a specific person. Granted, she doesn't know who that is till the end of the movie. However, she shared the information in a correspondence that she consented to. The things Joe Fox knows, he knows because KATHLEEN TOLD HIM.
Wes is essentially listening to her voice diaries and eves dropping on her grieving process.
Even that wouldn't really bother me as much if his visit to San Francisco was about trying to be a friend to someone and help her through her grieving process because he understands something about grief. If they fell in love as a result of that, cool.
Would it still be questionable if it happened in real life? Yes, but this is a movie. I understand the difference between real life and fantasy, and as long as they make it believable I can suspend disbelief.
But this is not about helping someone through the grieving process. It's about being enamored with her and wanting to be with her from the start. He is in love with an idea.
And then they get together (after two seconds of being "boy sober"). She makes him a dish similar to one his mom made which is apparently an immediate turn-on. He has a crisis of conscience, doesn't sleep with her but spends the night, and invites her to be his plus one at the wedding of his best friend.
There is no reason for them to be this close. Zero. Zilch.
They have not had any real connection over anything. Everything has been surface level. They've had fun, but that's it. It doesn't. make. sense.
The storytelling:
The first half of Voicemails for Isabelle is about Jill's relationship with her sister and how she tried to make her life fun even though she couldn't go out into the world. That was genuinely sweet.
I really felt the emotion when Isabelle died. It was devastating. I thought about texting my sister and telling her not to die...(Every time I watch Little Women, when it gets to the part of Beth dying, I have to text my sister and remind her not to get Scarlet Fever. It annoys her every time, it's fantastic. She's also probably the only person reading this blog post and is already well aware of my deep and abiding hatred for this movie. *waves hi*)
Unfortunately...it didn't carry over to the rest of the movie.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that she misses her sister is obvious by the way she keeps messaging her...but I would have liked to see an actual difference in how she led her life before and after Isabelle. It would have made the loss more poignant throughout the rest of the story.
Jill's string of one night flings were icky and gross to watch and made it impossible to distinguish the difference between those flighty relationships and the new one with Wes. It would have been better if there was one fling with the influencer guy and we had time to sit with that relationship fall out for a while. I needed to see her actually be alone for more than two seconds of the movie and not trying to medicate her loneliness with one night stands. Instead she goes directly from that ghosting to hanging out with Wes who...again, has virtually no character.
He does have a pretty face and gentlemanly manners....but there is nothing else to him. I needed more of his backstory to be shown, not just told, in order for me to care about him.
In You've Got Mail, we have the initial set up SHOWING us who these two characters are, who they care about, and what they care about. Everything that comes after that widens and deepens that understanding. We see them change over the course of the movie. We see them struggle personally and professionally. By the end of the movie we have seen both characters grow.
The emotional pay out is WELL EARNED.
The Big Reveal:
You've Got Mail:
Joe Fox finds out that Kathleen Kelly is his secret pen pal in the middle of the movie and has to reconcile that with the beautiful spirit he's been corresponding with. He has to examine his own character and see how he has contributed to their poor relationship from the start. He holds back from revealing himself first because he knows how much he has already hurt her. Later he holds back because he wants to show her who he really is before he tells her.
By the time Kathleen Kelly finds out the truth she has a better picture of who Joe Fox is and then has to reconcile that with the fantasy person she's been corresponding with. This whole thing takes place over the course of many months of conversations and interactions...with each other. Back and forth communication. In other words, she has enough information to make an informed decision about what kind of person she's going to be with.
Voicemails for Isabelle:
The big reveal happens by accident (again, after they've known each other less than a month) when Jill calls her sister and Wes' phone rings. Then he has to tell her he's been listening to her voicemails for almost a year. At this point, they've got nothing to fall back on. A revelation like that at this point in their relationship really should earn a RESTRAINING ORDER not a "You lied to me and I can't believe you would do this to me."
The emotional scene was completely unearned, as was every scene of their "relationship development".
Nora Ephron wrote a beautiful script with whimsical sentences that stay with you and make you feel like you are the ones in the movie. They make you feel the magic of every day things:
"Don't you love New York in the fall? Makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address."
They tell us what the characters are truly passionate about:
"When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does."
They give voice to the vulnerable parts of ourselves that we can't quite voice ourselves:
"Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void."
They communicate the character's seriousness about pursuing a relationship:
"If I hadn't been Fox Books and you hadn't been The Shop Around the Corner, and you and I had just, met....I would have asked for your number, and I wouldn't have been able to wait twenty-four hours before calling you and saying, "Hey, how about... oh, how about some coffee or, you know, drinks or dinner or a movie... for as long as we both shall live?" And you and I would have never been at war. And the only thing we'd fight about would be which video to rent on a Saturday night."
In Voicemails to Isabelle the main attraction seems to be access to people's unfiltered thoughts and as a result the audience has to endure the following lines:
"You know, who needs a midnight kiss when you can smash a taco? Am I right?"
and
"I don’t really have the tools for this. But… you make me feel brave. You make me feel everything. I know that you don’t need a man, Jill. But I sure as hell need you."
(Kisses her while her mouth is full of taco)
"That was good. Really good."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah. I feel like Meg Ryan."
UUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
At least we have a SMIDGEN of self awareness in the movie with this line:
"This is like some sick reboot of You've Got Mail."
"Tom Hanks is America's Sweetheart---"
"YOU ARE NOT TOM HANKS!"
Finally, something I can agree with. He is not Tom Hanks, she is definitely not Meg Ryan....and calling Voicemails for Isabelle a reboot of You've Got Mail is movie heresy.
