My Old Ass
It’s always tempting to look for themes at Sundance. Art reflects the world in which it was made, and independent cinema often finds commonality through happenstance. At its best, it captures something we’re all feeling or thinking, without even knowing it. There are about a dozen or so films at Sundance 2024 about the impact of A.I., so that’s definitely one, but I’ve also noticed a trend of “transition,” coming out of something ready to start the next chapter. Sure, that’s a timeless theme of art, but one wonders if the post COVID era of filmmaking is one of stories about people who are ready for the future, as scary as it may be.
Elliott (Maisy Stella) doesn’t really worry about the future as much as make pithy comments about how the Earth’s days are probably numbered. She lives in the moment, knowing that her life is about to drastically change when she leaves her family’s rural cranberry farm to go to college in Toronto. She’s leaving behind at least two good friends, two younger brothers, and supportive parents. It’s nice to see a Sundance family unit that isn’t deeply dysfunctional, although one gets the sense early on that Elliott takes her clan for granted. Didn’t we all at that age?
On her 18th birthday, Elliott goes to a remote island with her BFFs and goes on a mushroom trip that leads to something, well, impossible. She meets herself at age 39, played by Aubrey Plaza. Adult Elliott seems a little world wearier, laughing at the idea that her young self thought she’d have it all figured out by 40. (Again, didn’t we all?) On the insistence of her young self Elliott gives just one piece of advice avoid guys named Chad. Of course there is no shortage of new guys around this farm and you know full well what the new guy’s name is.
The conceit of “My Old Ass” is not unlike “All of Us Strangers” or “Petite Maman” (although that’s not meant to imply this is in the league of those masterful films) in that one has to go with the idea that Elliott maintains honest communication with her older self even after the drugs wear off. To be fair, writer, director Megan Park doesn’t lean on the premise too much Plaza is actually barely in the movie focusing more on Stella’s genuinely charming performance as she navigates a coming of age comedy with a twist.
“My Old Ass” is essentially about that idea that we don’t know the last time we’ll pick up our kids or play with our childhood friends on a playground, but how that truth shouldn’t terrify us but force us into making the most of every encounter. With three kids of my own between 10 and 14, I’m increasingly aware that my days with my children as children are coming to an end, and I’ve been consciously trying to live in those moments. While some of “My Old Ass” is clunky, and a lot is clichéd, it struck a chord with me. And given its standing ovation and open weeping at Monday night’s premiere, I don’t think I was alone.
Another type of transition in a person’s life is shown in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” which was written by Amy Liptrot (who also co-wrote the screenplay). In this film, Saoirse Ronan gives one of her best performances to date as Rona, who has to go all the way to the literal end of the world to fight her inner demons. Shot on islands off Scotland’s northern coast that seem like they’re about to be blown away by wind at any minute, “The Outrun” is an example of how Ronan belongs among the greatest actors of her generation; however, these structural and pacing choices made by Fingscheidt and Liptrot don’t do justice to what she does here, needlessly jumbling up the story and dragging it out past where it should have ended.
“The Outrun” cuts back and forth between different points in Rona’s life, mostly centered around the Orkney Islands, which are located at the very top of England. After living in London for some time, Rona has returned home there though it’s not much of a refuge when all she has is her deeply religious mother Annie (Saskia Reeves), who judges every move her daughter makes, and her father Andrew (Stephen Dillane), whose bipolar disorder keeps him battling his own demons while living alone with them in a caravan on his farm. Loneliness permeates every part of Rona’s being. She tries approaching strangers just to have someone tell her she doesn’t belong in their group; she goes swimming fully clothed in freezing water, she sits outside on rocks during storms, letting herself get soaked through moments that only help us understand more deeply how sad this character really is.
Rona understands that all this has happened because she did it to herself. She drinks too much. We see multiple flashbacks showing us what went wrong for her at school in London, all of which culminated in a night of extreme violence with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), the love of her life. It was the kind of night that landed Rona in rehab, but it’s hard to stay sober when there’s literally nothing else to do.
Saoirse Ronan is once again giving a performance so lived-in that it’s frustrating how much the script feels like it needs to play games with what she does here, and all for the sake of some final-act revelations about Rona’s worst behavior. There’s no reason not to tell this story straight through other than saving those moments but they’re not worth saving at the expense of everything else “The Outrun” could have been. The movie jumps around so often and so unintelligibly that it loses any emotional impact it might have had just charting one person’s growth, recovery, and daily struggles with alcoholism; Ronan keeps us watching because we believe in her character every step of the way, especially if we’ve battled similar demons ourselves, but most other people aren’t going to stick around through all these unnecessary complications when they don’t even trust enough in what she can do on her own without their added confusion.
Ultimately, this is a film that tries to be two things at once and in doing so becomes neither. Music video director Jack Begert’s “Little Death,” from the NEXT program, starts as one movie and abruptly shifts into another in tone, style, character and theme. Both halves of the film are connected by addiction, and it could be argued that our current pharmaceutical crisis reaches all classes of people, still, I couldn’t help feeling like these two parts didn’t quite cohere into a whole so much as they left me wanting more.
The first half of “Little Death” is an overcaffeinated, self conscious and cloying story about a screenwriter (David Schwimmer) who hates everything: He has come to despise his fiancée (Jena Malone), almost wishing the mole on her neck were cancerous; he’s fixated on the dreams he keeps having about a mysterious woman (Angela Sarafayan). He’s writing what else? a script about a writer, and occasionally “Little Death” gets meta in such a way that it seems like what we’re watching is said writer’s screenplay made into a film. When the studio tells him they’ll greenlight it if he changes the gender of his mostly autobiographical protagonist, “Little Death” really doubles down on its critique of how difficult it is to be a white middle aged dude in Hollywood. Yes, it acknowledges we don’t need any more movies like this, still, for the most part, that’s exactly what it remains.
Then suddenly it isn’t anymore. In discussing why would ruin much of what makes “Little Death” so confounding; essentially we get to know two young people (Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder) whose lives become entwined during one very bad night involving drugs, death, dogs both stolen and lost etcetera. The style lightens considerably after the first half’s oppressive heaviness, and Begert actually makes a stronger film here but it is still only half of a film, one that needs fleshing out in certain places and maybe even some recasting. Every now and then you watch a movie where it feels like one performer is doing something very different from everyone else in the cast, this time around that would be Talia Ryder (co-star of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”), who’s so good here that you kind of wish she could walk into another, better movie.
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