Ingrid Goes West is one of the movies from 2017 that got by me, but which might very well have made my Top Movies of the Year list if I had seen it in time- or, at the very least, given me reason to expand it to 20 instead of 15.
The main draw for me here was the two leading ladies, Elizabeth Olsen and Aubrey Plaza. Olsen was, of course, in one of my Top 5 Movies of the Year, Wind River, and has been doing fine work for some time, notably in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though she's probably best-known for being the Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Universe and for being the most talented Olsen sister, IMHO.
Meanwhile, I've had a thing for Plaza ever since I saw her on TV's Parks and Recreation, where she was the snarky love interest for then-future star Chris Pratt. I've basically seen everything's she's done since. My favorites of her impressive resume to date include Safety Not Guaranteed, The To Do List, Life After Beth, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates and the excellent X-Men TV-spin-off Legion, which will be back soon on FX for its long-awaited second season.
Here, Plaza plays the titular Ingrid, a social media addict that gets a little too fixated on a local girl that she was "friends" with online and gets sent to a mental health facility when she crashes the girl's wedding and attacks her after the girl doesn't invite her to said wedding.
We discover that Ingrid's mother died, which was part of what set her off- though not all. Obviously, Ingrid is mentally unstable as well, perhaps making a medical facility the best place for her. Nonetheless, she gets put on the appropriate meds and is released, upon which she discovers she has inherited quite a bit of money.
No sooner is she back home when she starts following another girl online, this time a "social influencer" named Taylor Sloane. If you don't know what that is, it's basically the Millennial version of a socialite, which is to say, someone famous for being famous.
Taylor just posts pictures of herself wherever she goes, looking like she's having the BEST TIME EVAH! That's about it. (Yes, that's what qualifies as a job these days.) Of course, she doesn't forget to occasionally plug something or another, be it food, fashion or some beauty product or whatever, for which she is paid to do so, thus allowing her to make a living basically being a social gadfly.
Finding another person to fixate upon, Ingrid, as the title says, decides to go west, moving to California to pursue her latest object of affection. She rents a place from local Dan Pinto (O'Shea Jackson Jr, aka Ice Cube's son, from Straight Outta Compton), and begins to not-so-subtly stalk Taylor, using Taylor's own posts to pinpoint where she'll be, in a sort of inverted Bling Ring move.
After going to some considerable lengths which I won't spoil here, Ingrid manages to insinuate herself into Taylor's life, befriending her and her boyfriend, Ezra O'Keefe (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt, from Everybody Wants Some!), a struggling artist, who himself takes other people's work and tries to glom onto it by painting trendy hashtags on it, like a sort of Millennial Andy Warhol. (See example below.)
Things take a turn when Taylor's recovering drug addict brother, Nicky (Billy Magnussen, who, appropriately enough, played Kato Kaelin in the OJ-themed last season of American Crime Story) arrives and starts to monopolize Taylor's time, to both Ingrid and Ezra's chagrin.
To make matters worse, Taylor herself becomes infatuated with being friends with a fashion blogger, Harley Chung (Pom Klementieff, Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2) more influential and famous than herself, which, needless to say, leaves Ingrid side-lined, which doesn't sit well with her, to say the least. Things go from there, with amusingly cringe-inducing results.
Okay, so the chief complaint here, I'm guessing, from SJW-types, is that people with mental health issues are no laughing matter and it's not cool to make light of them. If you feel this way, and the premise here upsets you, then you might want to skip this one, for obvious reasons.
For the rest of us that get that it's ONLY A FUCKING MOVIE, the end results are pretty entertaining, and not at all unsympathetic to Ingrid's issues. The main point here seems to be that everyone has issues, in fact, and that everyone has their hang-ups and insecurities, and wants to be loved for who they are, even if that involves emulating/falling for someone else that we think of as being more "fabulous" than we are.
Of course, those of us with a working brain know better. As I mentioned, these "social influencers" are paid to hock people's stuff, and are rarely having as much fun as it seems. For instance, in one scene, Taylor has Ingrid pose with her in front of a Pop Art-looking sign looking like they're having the time of their lives, when, in fact, they're at a auto shop getting their car (actually, it's Dan's- everyone here "borrows") fixed by a mechanic at the time, after it breaks down. Taylor even has the poor mechanic take the pic, all but commanding him to get down in the dirt to take it from the "perfect angle."
Obviously, the point is, you can't always trust what you see in your Instagram feed. But also that we all have to hustle a bit to get by. Taylor isn't above "stalking" someone more famous than herself to further her own career. Ezra isn't so much an artist as a Warhol-type appropriator. Dan is a Batman-fixated would-be screenwriter that has spent years working on a script he doesn't even have the rights to produce, it being Batman-oriented, but of course.
In a great deleted scene, the group of "friends" (and I use that term very loosely) stage a read-through of Dan's script, after which it takes the near-brain-dead Nicky to point out that, if Dan just lost all the Batman stuff and changed the names of the characters, Dan would have an amazing script that he could actually do something with.
Meanwhile, Nicky himself uses others to further his life of leisure, at one point trying to out-fox Ingrid at her own game, which doesn't go well for him- or her, for that matter. The point here seems to be, maybe if we lost all the artifice and just tried to, you know, put down our phones and relate to each other one-on-one, instead of always seeking the next plateau of acceptance in society by putting forth an image of success, we might actually succeed on our own terms, rather than projecting the mere image of success instead.
That does admittedly make the final scenes of the movie all the more tragic, but all-too-believable as well. I'm not sure anyone learns any lesson from the events of the film, but who says they have to? That's not the point. I think the filmmakers want us to instead. Nothing wrong with that.
First-time feature director Matt Spicer, who also co-wrote with Enlightened associate producer David Branson Smith, does a great job here in his debut film, making some provocative points without slamming the viewer on the head with them. It's more the sort of film that one draws their own conclusions from, really. You might draw a different one than I did, which is fine, too.
The cast is just great across the board. Plaza has an easy chemistry with both Olsen and Jackson, who becomes a sort-of default love interest for Ingrid, when she needs one, before developing into something resembling the real thing. (Few things are what they seem on the surface in this movie.) Magnussen positively oozes sleaze as Taylor's brother, but ultimately, he's no better or worse than anyone else in this movie.
That said, this is undeniably Plaza's movie. She's the focal point, and the one we most relate to and side with, even as she goes to crazier and crazier lengths to accomplish her goals. After all, all she wants is to fit in, to have a "real" friend, to be loved. Who can't relate to that, especially in this day and age of three-steps-removed Insta-fame?
Ingrid Goes West isn't perfect- debut features rarely are. It drags a bit in the middle and meanders a bit, and as I mentioned, the filmmaker opted to cut out one of the best scenes in the movie! But it is pretty damned impressive for a first timer, and that's enough to make Spicer a director to watch in the future. Once he works out the kinks, he could be a contender- and that's what we all want in the end, isn't it?
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