By Gary Thompson / The Philadelphia Inquirer
Early in “Ingrid Goes West,” a young woman on her way to Los Angeles conspicuously reads from Joan Didion’s collected essays on California titled “The White Album.”
The book is famous for the line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Today we post these stories on Instagram or Facebook, becoming the unreliable narrators of our own lives, casting about for what Didion called “the imposition of a narrative line.”
“Ingrid Goes West” is a status update of these themes. Directed by Matt Spicer, the movie is an inventive and shrewd satire of the way social media can be used to describe and distort the lives of users.
It’s overdue. Given the drastic changes this technology has wrought on culture and on the behavior of individuals, it’s a little weird that Hollywood hasn’t scrutinized the subject with more vigor.
In “Ingrid Goes West,” the movie’s title character (Aubrey Plaza) is a young woman whose fragile mental health is established in the very first scene, crashing a wedding.
She is, to say the least, poorly equipped to maintain successful real-life friendships. So she heads for L.A. and Hollywood, where the boundaries of real life are more elastic, even more so as lives have moved online (the movie has amusing insight of the latest iterations of L.A. creative-class materialism).
Ingrid becomes enchanted with Instagram “influencer” Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), following her on the web, and then just plain following her. The crafty, needy Ingrid successfully ingratiates herself with Taylor, via social media and through old-fashioned, analogue stalking techniques.
The kicker: Ingrid pursues this simulation of affection even as the real thing turns up in her life. Ingrid’s neighbor (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) has a crush on her, but Ingrid can only think to use her growing intimacy with him to further her phony friendship with Taylor.
Jackson, by the way, is somewhat of a revelation. He shows a confident, relaxed screen presence 180 degrees removed from the scowling impersonator of his real-life dad, Ice Cube, that we saw in “Straight Outta Compton.” And he has a knack for comedy — his character is a Batman fanatic, and a scene detailing a cosplay consummation with Ingrid is one of the year’s funniest.
As for Plaza, we already know she’s funny from her roles in “Parks and Recreation” and “Safety Not Guaranteed.” Here, she pushes bravely back against her image as the shrugging slacker who doesn’t care about anything. Ingrid cares obsessively, completely, destructively.
The reckoning for all of this finds Plaza at her most honest and vulnerable — embodying, as Didion once wrote of herself, a woman who comes “to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.”
That lady was a pretty good writer. You’d think she’d have more followers.
‘Ingrid Goes West’ (3 stars)
In this shrewd satire of social media culture and creative class materialism, a young woman in fragile mental health (Aubrey Plaza) heads for Los Angeles and Hollywood where she becomes enchanted with an Instagram “influencer” played by Elizabeth Olsen.
Rated: R, for language
Opening Friday: Alderwood Mall, Cinebarre Mountlake Terrace, Galaxy Monroe, Sundance Cinemas, Thornton Place
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