Audrey Plaza has thing about her that may eventually be her downfall as she ends up typecast, but while she can ride it out, will prove a great success. That thing is her face and how she so effortlessly uses it to look utterly detached and almost disdainfully bemused by whatever is happening around her. Personally, I love it. There’s quirky and then there’s Plaza. Plaza wins.
I’ll admit, I’ve never seen a single episode of Parks and Recreation. And never will. That kind of comedy isn’t my thing despite my admiration for several of the cast members on that show for their overall work. I ‘discovered’ Plaza in a little-seen film called Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), which I strongly urge you seek out. I fell immediately in love with whatever she was doing there and wanted to see her keep doing it. While I’m not a fan of a lot of her movies, I am always – always – gripped by her performances and the way she creates utterly believable yet somehow hyper-over-exaggerated spins on characters she portrays. Dirty Grandpa is a dreadful movie and yet Plaza is shockingly fun to watch. There’s flirty and then there’s Plaza. Plaza wins.
Anyway, on with the show here. I want to post a few words on her turn in the 2017 comedy/drama Ingrid Goes West, which I consider her best work to date, even though she has never showed up not fully on her game in any role.
The story centers on Ingrid, a young woman with some clear boundary issues, finding nothing special about herself and so projecting friendship through social media, something that surely millions do every day. It leads her to big trouble, feeling rejected when a person she follows on Instagram doesn’t reciprocate. That’s just the setup, and it’s chilling to watch even as it’s sort of played up with sport to it. Ingrid’s actions toward her target are troubling but symbolize a true terror that is at the potential end of any unhinged follower.
Either way, after some time in custody, Ingrid earns a fair sum of money that I’ll leave you to learn about and finds a new Instagram target friend. Her name is Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), a sort of hippie-esque fashion icon who poses with products and while almost unseemly happy is, as we discover, somewhat shallow. No matter for Ingrid, who packs up her life and heads west to California, steadily working to embed herself in Taylor’s life. Turns out, it’s not so hard.
This is a straight-forward story with a mostly predictable path but the journey there is peppered with some jarring takes on the Ingrid character, whom we weirdly find ourselves sympathetic to, mostly because she’s a human being in the most profoundly essential way – she wants someone to notice her. Of course, she is obsessed by that drive and what Plaza does with that, under the smart direction of Matt Spicer, is both fun to watch and eventually painful.
This is a not so subtle shot at ‘influencer’ culture, a word I so loath my fingers curled into fist while typing it out. Ingrid starts this movie weeping, and we’re right in her face, showing us that life through a mobile phone screen is matter-of-factly harmful. That’s a powerful tentpole that supports everything she does afterward, even when it seems she’s able to hold herself together and be somewhat ‘normal’ around those she has magnetized herself upon. One of the real victims in her way is a nice young man named Dan Pinto (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a Batman-loving landlord who offers her a place to stay in L.A. and pays a hard price, though is, as we find out, not the cliché he seems set up for at the end.
There are a string of great moments in this, with Plaza holding high court over them all, playing deranged with a wistful sexuality and playful sense of innocence. What could be so bad about liking someone? A lot, it turns out, and while Ingrid Goes West is not a horror film, as several in this genre tend to be, it is often scary in that Ingrid is in fact the embodiment of (surely) far too many clicking about social media. The final words of the film nail that home with a heavy whoop that is surprisingly effective because it’s framed as a positive but after an emotion-soaked second becomes soured by a terrible truth. There’s razor sharp satire and then there’s Plaza. You know the rest.