Review: 'Voicemails for Isabelle'
Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson have effortless chemistry in a bittersweet rom-com that finds comfort in food, heartbreak, and life’s kumquats.
Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson have effortless chemistry in a bittersweet rom-com that finds comfort in food, heartbreak, and life’s kumquats.
When Nick Offerman’s Chef Bastien first appears, you think the kitchen is not a safe space for our heroine, Jill (Zoey Deutch). Not sure I found Chef funny.
But in that post-breakup time, during the soufflé showdown in the messy, Top Chef-y kitchen, it is peak funny. Offerman tasting the entries, and then Jill exposing his pretensions got me hacking so bad. And watching this with bad asthma that I could hear a motor sound within me while laughing out loud. Pneumonia? I don’t know, my lad!
If you watch this at my age, what resonates more than giddy romance is real life depicted. The grief, the ghosters, and sometimes when life keeps throwing kumquats at you at rapid speed, and you thinking about being boy sober because you are just not “lucky” in that department.
Never mind that Jill’s Shakespearean dialogue sometimes becomes tiresome and too smart-alecky, but she brings so much rawness to the role of a grief-stricken “hero-brother” to a dead sister, her lad, her Izzy.
Conflict is predictable, of course, when the romantic hero of this plot, Wes (Nick Robinson), a boyishly handsome real estate guy, starts getting Jill’s voicemails as the inheritor of Isabelle’s SIM card.
Fast-paced. Chuckles here and there. Your heart breaks every time Jill’s eyes would well up with tears. Deutch plays Jill with heart and soul.
Netflix rarely produces something you could actually finish. But this one? I did. It actually took a bad case of cough, colds, and asthma to render me bedridden and streaming this.
This is not just a fairy-tale rom-com. But it will also make you, through Jill, feel what real life is — with yummy food on top. There’s nothing like a good mainstream flick with food as a subplot.
Life. It is a wheel. Hard times. Hope. Failure. Blessings. And since it is a love story, good old romance (they have chemistry). Some corny bits, but forgivable. Sometimes Netflix ain’t bad at all.
