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As someone who’s never taken a single economics class but has watched almost every rom-com made in the past 30 or so years, I flatter myself to think the great rom-com recession, in which we’ve been mired since roughly the 2010s, is more complicated than any monetary recession. Though many have tried, no one’s ever managed to successfully explain what happened to a once reliably crowd-pleasing and moneymaking movie category using mere facts and figures. After watching Netflix’s Voicemails for Isabelle, however, I would like to offer up a new theory: Did the decline of rom-coms coincide with society’s realization that many of the ways characters behave in the pursuit of love in our most beloved examples of the genre are, in fact, disturbing?
I’m talking about standing outside a woman’s window holding up a boom box blaring the song you first made love to, showing up at a woman’s house armed with a series of posterboards on which you’ve written out a confession of your love, tracking down a man you’ve never met because he sounded attractive on a call-in radio show—these sort of things. Voicemails for Isabelle’s premise certainly fits right in: Grieving the recent death of her sister Isabelle, an aspiring chef named Jill ( Zoey Deutch) begins leaving voicemails for Isabelle at her old phone number. Unbeknownst to Jill, the number has been reassigned to real estate guy Wes (Nick Robinson), who takes a liking to her through her messages and eventually uses the knowledge he gleans from them to engineer a not-so-chance encounter with her.
I tend to think of the impulse to “actually”-bomb these movies as a phenomenon of the rise of social media in the late aughts and 2010s, but the New York Times cited an earlier precedent for doing so in its review of Voicemails: As with many internet jokes, all roads lead back to the Onion, specifically a 1999 article with the headline “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested.” In the years since that article’s publication, it’s become almost a cliché to point out that many of the actions taken by rom-com heroines would not fly in the real world. To which I say: Well, duh.
Though a more nuanced understanding of boundaries and gender dynamics has on the whole been beneficial, it’s possible that it’s had the opposite effect on movies. It would indeed be a huge violation to use essentially the same sort of phone-hacking methods that once brought down a U.K. tabloid to get a girl to like you in real life. In Voicemails, it works, because of both the script and Deutch’s winning presence selling it. A few reviews have disagreed, of course, with the Guardian declaring the film “creepy.” Audiences seem unbothered, propelling Voicemails to the No. 1 spot on Netflix’s Top 10 list since its release last week. It’s even become trendy to post on social media about how the movie reduced you to a “sobbing mess.” Mostly, I’m just proud of the internet for not moving to cancel a fictional character for what feels like the first time in a while. The audience was able to see that the core of the story is Jill and Isabelle’s relationship and not get too bogged down in the whole voicemails thing. For once, I have hope for the future of media literacy.
Have we finally ascended to a higher plane where people are starting to understand that it is often helpful for story purposes for characters to be flawed people who occasionally make bad decisions? I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m glad if this means movies are employing compelling premises again. For too long, we’ve suffered through Netflix rom-coms whose central conflicts were that Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher couldn’t fall in love because they were friends who switched houses (?) or that two Gen Z cuties couldn’t fall in love because they were friends who liked to go on vacation together (??). We must reject this! I would much rather watch a movie where one character does something that genuinely pisses the other off.
Though this movie slightly suffers from the same problem as one of the much-loved ’90s movies that inspired it, You’ve Got Mail, in that its male main character starts out as a bit of a prick and may still be one at the end, I was impressed by its deftness. Perhaps the bar is too low, but I almost cheered at the scene when Wes’ secret nefarious behavior was revealed for how completely plausible it all was—yes, one could lend a girl a blazer without realizing that it contained one’s phone. Remember in Titanic when Billy Zane realizes he left the Heart of the Ocean in his coat that he put on Kate Winslet? We’re going back to basics, to a time of jacket-assisted plotting and a healthy suspension of disbelief, and I think movies will be all the better for it. It helps that voicemails aren’t some newfangled technology that risks making the premise of the movie inherently dated, like the recent thriller inspired by air-drop technology that was actually kind of OK but is diminished every time you have to describe it as … a thriller inspired by air-drop technology. Voicemails are legible, uncomplicated, but importantly, still current. They’ve gotten unpopular, with millennials especially professing to hate them, but this Voicemail wasn’t so bad.
