Premise: Izzy, after a night of drinking, needs to...get the fuck across town.
Izzy is another entry from my "Oh my god, this cast!" list that has really been paying dividends the last few months for me. Mackenzie Davis is the eponymous Izzy, and she's the only constant character throughout it. You see, this is an Odyssey movie in which Izzy moves from place to place in Los Angeles, going on small adventures with people along the way. In traditional indie movie fashion, I got the sense that someone called in a lot of favors and got reasonably famous people to spend an afternoon being weird or singing.
I really need to give this cast credit. In addition to Davis, it's got LaKeith Stanfield, Haley Joel Osment, Alia Shawkat, Kyle Kinane, Annie Potts, Carrie Coon, Rob Huebel, Sarah Goldberg, and a bunch of other people I know by look if not name. That's a lot of good people for what I realized pretty quickly is a cheap movie. I wish I was better at identifying what makes a cheap movie. I normally credit it to the sound: both the mixing of the music and the levels of the dialogue. There's a visual element too that I'm worse at identifying. The movie quality is fine. It's not like I'm watching slapdash iPhone footage, but it's definitely inexpensive in a way that then got me wondering how many of the homes in the movie belonged to producers or crew for the movie.
Once you get past the required complications for this movie - Izzy's phone is dead, her car is in the shop, she's too broke for an Uber - I like how the movie ambles along. Each mini-adventure is fairly self-contained. Other than knowing how each loose story leads her to the next, there's room for them to be about anything. I like to believe that director Christian Papierniak and Davis just showed up each day with that day's actor and said "What are you feeling like doing or talking about today?" I doubt it actually happened like that, but it feels like it could be true. Maybe LaKeith Stanfield decided it would be fun if he was a helicopter pilot or Alia Shawkat felt like musing about successful people. The Kyle Kinane and Haley Joel Osment characters sure felt like ideas they would've come up with.
I also like how as I'm following Izzy throughout her day, I'm trying to figure out what she was up to the night before with the waiter's outfit stained in wine and blood. The movie never fully explains it but it keeps giving enough for me to paint a picture by the end.
It makes a lot of sense that most of the director's credits other than this are for directing NBA 2K games, because there is a choose your own adventure quality to the movie. I imagine directing those games (I'll assume it's referring to the franchise mode mainly, but IMDB isn't that specific) requires him to think in story chunks that don't interfere too much with the gameplay. And that really explains the structuring of this movie. No adventure impacts anything else. The final act would play out virtually the same way even if she showered and lounged around the house all day before getting a cab to the party.
I wish more of the oddness of the movie could've translated to actual comedy, and I do wish it had a little more of a clear vision from beginning to end. Yes, that is me complaining about the very thing I praised it for. Some people can't just be pleased. It's more of a goldilocks balance thing though. I like the crazy adventures, but I'd like more of a sense that someone is steering the ship. I think Davis is 100% the right person for this role. She's great at playing a screw up who is also motivated, which is a tricky balance. And this movie gave me a Carrie Coon/Mackenzie Davis duet, so what am I really complaining about?
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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