Mack & Rita: Body-swap redux

Mack & Rita (2022) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for sexual candor, drug use and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This is a modestly entertaining rom-com fantasy … when it gets out of its own way.

 

Actress-turned-first-time-director Katie Aselton tries much too hard at times, particularly during an off-putting first act that smacks of desperation. She tolerates the over-acting and breathlessly exaggerated line deliveries that suggest she and the cast don’t entirely trust Madeline Walter and Paul Welsh’s script.

 

"Aunt Rita" (Diane Keaton, center), encouraged by the younger self within her old body,
attempts to make the most of a group exercise session

Matters aren’t helped when the flow constantly is interrupted by Leo Birenberg’s overstated score and a paralyzingly loud assortment of raucous pop tunes. Or by the fact that Walter and Welsh open their story with a tiresome dog-pee incident. (Isn’t it time to retire this sight gag for eternity?)

Things improve as the tone settles down, and the story establishes its identity. By the final act, the actors have settled into their roles; the characters have grown on us, and the conclusion — although blatantly obvious throughout — is rather sweet.

 

Fledgling author Mack (Elizabeth Lail), with one published book under her belt, struggles — under the “guidance” of her smug and condescending agent (Patti Harrison, thoroughly obnoxious) — to generate “content” for a social media realm of influencers and “likes.” And she wonders: Is this really writing? (Answer: Of course not.)

 

The situation is worsened by Mack’s inherent nature; she’s an “old soul” in a young body, having been raised by a grandmother who encouraged her interest in retro clothes and genteel manners. None of this is appropriate behavior or attire for the wedding plans being made for longtime best friend Carla (Taylour Paige), who has arranged a “gal pal” weekend Palm Springs retreat with party-hearty posse buddies Sunita (Aimee Carrero) and Ali (Addie Weyrich).

 

Aselton obviously encouraged Carrero and Weyrich to be as aggressively unpleasant as possible: a challenge they embrace with enthusiasm. One wonders: Are they supposed to be funny? If so, they miss by a mile.

 

Worn down by too much drinking and clubbing, Mack opts out of a flash concert, choosing instead to investigate the offer of spiritual relaxation in a tent set up in an otherwise vacant lot. (You gotta just roll with this.) Much like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, this tent is much larger on the inside; Mack cheerfully parts with her credit card in order to embrace her true inner self in a “regression pod” that looks suspiciously like a recycled tanning booth. (You really gotta just roll with this.)

 

After screaming her desire to become the 70-year-old she knows resides inside her, Mack gets her wish; when she emerges, fresh-faced Lail has been replaced by Diane Keaton.

 

Although disorientation and hysteria seem a reasonable first response, Keaton wildly overplays these early scenes, to a degree that’s embarrassing. 

Uncle Frank: One of the year's best

Uncle Frank (2020) • View trailer

4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and drug use

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.27.20 

I haven’t been this nervous since Anne Hathaway reached for the microphone, in 2008’s Rachel Getting Married.

 

Although she has adored him her entire life, Beth (Sophia Lillis) begins to realize that
there's a lot more to her Uncle Frank (Paul Bettany) than he reveals to most people.

Writer/director Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank — an Amazon Prime original — is a deeply personal and sensitively handled character study, brought to life by an excellent ensemble cast headed by Paul Bettany, Sophia Lillis and Peter Macdissi. Ball deftly walks the razor’s edge that often separates comedy from tragedy, delicately developing circumstances that set up a third-act revelation/confrontation that raises our anxiety to the screaming level.

 

We know an emotional train wreck is coming.

 

A lengthy prologue — set in 1969, in tiny Creekville, S.C. — introduces the Bledsoe clan during a rowdy birthday party for elderly patriarch Daddy Mac (Stephen Root). Three generations are present: Daddy Mac, his wife Mammaw (Margo Martindale) and Aunt Butch (Lois Smith); adult children Frank (Bettany), Neva (Jane McNeill) and Mike (Steve Zahn); the latter two’s respective spouses, Beau (Burgess Jenkins) and Kitty (Judy Greer); and a rambunctious passel of grandkids.

 

Fourteen-year-old Beth (Lillis) stands out as a quiet observer, keenly attuned to the moods of others. Alas, she isn’t quick enough to prevent an irate Daddy Mac from explosively chewing out the younger kids: an eyebrow-raising moment that reveals a truly nasty temper.

 

We also don’t notice Frank right away; like Beth, he seems somehow removed from the noisy celebration. The exchange of gifts reveals a guarded dynamic between Frank and his unpleasant father. We assume it’s the former’s outsider status; unlike everybody else in the room, Frank long ago left Creekville for the Big Apple, where he has become a revered literature professor at New York University (NYU).

 

Frank escaped the vicious cycle of high school pregnancies that trap Creekville 16-year-olds into a lifetime of drudge jobs: a fate he hopes Beth also can avoid. He’s her favorite adult: the only one who treats her like a person, and not a child, listening attentively to her every word. But she fears her limited options, given family circumstances.

 

Don’t settle for who people expect you to become, he advises; become who you want to be.

 

That sentiment caps an achingly sweet and poignant chat on the porch, an entire world removed from the noisy clan on the other side of the wall: staged by Ball with carefully nuanced sensitivity, and delivered with touching persuasiveness by Bettany and Lillis.

 

This film is bookended by an older Beth’s off-camera narration, much in the manner of the adult Scout, in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird. (A bit later, Ball cheekily has Beth admit that Harper Lee is one of her favorite authors.)

 

Lady Bird: Truly soars

Lady Bird (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Well into writer/director Greta Gerwig’s accomplished filmmaking debut, the story’s protagonist is complimented — by her high school counselor — on the depth of feeling she expresses, in a college application essay, for the city in which she has grown up: a city from which she’s eager to escape.

As the high school senior prom approaches, Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, left) brings her
mother (Laurie Metcalf) along when she tries out a series of dresses: an excursion that
takes place amid the organized clutter of Sacramento's massive Thrift Town store.

The city is Sacramento, where Gerwig herself grew up, and her film exhibits the same reverence. Indeed, I doubt Sacramento ever again will be the subject of such a heartfelt cinematic valentine.

Lady Bird can’t help feeling semi-autobiographical; Gerwig’s characteristic personality shines throughout, easily recognized from her starring roles in quirky indie dramedies such as Lola Versus, Frances Ha and Mistress America. Her filmmaking debut is both an engaging and painfully raw coming-of-age saga, and a respectful appreciation for the environment that shaped her as an artist.

A kiss on Sacramento’s cheek, and an earnest Thank You.

But that’s merely the narrative portion of Gerwig’s film. She also deserves credit for coaxing persuasively intimate performances from her stars: most notably Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, who deliver one of the most tempestuous, complicated and deeply loving mother/daughter relationships ever depicted on camera.

The year is 2002, as the United States enters a new national mindset in the wake of 9/11. We meet Ronan’s Christine McPherson on the eve of her senior year in high school, which she’s horrified to discover will be spent at a Catholic school. She’s a rebellious young adult, with strikingly dyed hair and an insistence that everybody — even family members — refer to her as “Lady Bird”: a name she has given herself, as opposed to the one that was thrust upon her.

She has little use for her post-college brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), both of whom share the small, cramped house which is all that Lady Bird’s parents — Marion (Laurie Metcalf) and Larry (Tracy Letts) — can afford. Lady Bird is deeply ashamed of living on “the wrong side of the tracks”; it’s one of the innumerable “slights” that she takes personally, and for which she — unjustly, and immaturely — blames her parents.

She’s a teenager, in every horrific sense of the term: stubborn, selfish, shallow, spiteful and short-tempered.