Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town Movie Review

Izzy, a very brash young woman, wakes up hung over and dizzy in Santa Monica. She’s in the apartment of someone she doesn’t know and who she doesn’t remember meeting. Right at this very moment, and you get the feeling there are many, she knows she must get her life together but continually makes excuses as to why nothing is her fault. Wearing her crumpled catering uniform from the night before, she leaves and finds out that her ex-boyfriend Roger (Russell) is marrying her former best friend. Knowing they were together was bad enough but she can’t stand the idea of forever if she isn’t the person he’s marrying. The rest of the film is about what she does to get to the engagement party and break them up.

Izzy calls in as many chits as she can but has burned every bridge she could possibly to use, finding her journey quite difficult. She tries desperately to get people to understand that this time is different, that she has changed, but that’s what she always says. She’s even, at that moment, getting kicked out of the home she’s been staying in because her friends are done enabling her, something she desperately needs someone to do if she’s ever to get better. Izzy has a strong belief and faith in signs from the universe and attempts to use this faith, and the explanation of destiny, on her friends to get them to help her on her journey, but they’ve had enough. During the rest of the film, we meet people who have tried to help her in the past and who she has regularly not appreciate, disappointed and pushed away, including family.

On her own, she gets creative with her methods of transportation. With the use of a bike, a scooter, a stranger, and theft she manages to make her way to her sister Virginia’s (Coon) house. The defining moment of the film is when the two siblings, once singers in a local band, perform a duet. Davis and Coon sound great together, and the time with her sister, while being used to get what she wants, brings Izzy to realize what she has been missing out on. You’d think by now she would have learned something about herself but even at her sister’s house, something happens that tells you she hasn’t changed, she’s only masking who she truly is.

The trip we take with Izzy is rabid and chaotic and once she reaches her destination, director Christian Papierniak uses color as a way to calm things down a bit, introducing us to the reason for all this pandemonium, Roger. The message of the movie is that Alcoholics don’t need the thing they want, only want what they think they need. It goes for people, too. Does Izzy’s heart remain shattered forever? Does she learn from previous mistakes? Will she get the boy in the end? The ending is what I enjoyed most about, ‘Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town’ and I think you will too so I’m not about to answer any of those questions… you’ll have to go and see it for yourself.