Margo Robbie is one of the biggest names in Hollywood today, so when she decides her company will produce the second feature by young Canadian director, Megan Park, it’s a huge endorsement. It might have been even better had Robbie acted in this movie, as a little star power would have added to its box office appeal. The only actor with any kind of profile is comedian, Audrey Plaza, and she’s still waiting for a career-defining role.
The main character is 18-year-old Elliott, played with verve by Maisy Stella. She lives in a scenic part of Canada on the Muskoka Lakes, where her parents have a cranberry farm. Elliott has finished high school and is preparing to go to university, so this is her last summer at home. Being a thoroughly modern girl, she identifies as “queer”, and spends her holidays hanging out with like-minded friends, Ro and Ruthie (Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Ziegler), or making out with lust objet, Chelsea (Alexandra Rivera).
Completely forgetting about her mother, father and two younger brothers, who are waiting at home with her birthday cake, Elliott boats off to a wooded island with Ro and Ruthie, where they set up a tent and take magic mushrooms. While she is tripping, Elliott meets her older self at age 39 (Audrey Plaza), who gives her a glimpse into the future but holds back more than she reveals.
Upon returning to planet earth, Elliott thinks it was all a hallucination but finds her other self has left a phone number on her mobile, under the name “My Old Ass”. The two versions of Elliott begin to talk on the phone, with the older one passing on some sage advice: be nice to your mother, get to know your brother, and have nothing to do with anybody named Chad. Needless to say, it takes minutes for Chad (Percy Hynes White) to appear, and he seems disturbingly charming and funny.
This sets up the mild mystery-drama-comedy that occupies the rest of the film. What’s the matter with Chad? Is he a heartbreaker? A serial killer? And how about Elliott herself? She thought she only liked girls but is ineluctably drawn to this lanky fellow. Repeated phone calls to older self elicit no replies, and she’s getting in deeper all the time. We await the big reveal, but it’s not exactly edge-of-your-seat stuff.
As a coming-of-age story, the film’s major distinction lies in the supernatural twist of connecting with one’s future self, but this time-travel motif is woefully underdeveloped. As every science fiction writer knows, start messing with time and paradoxes spring up at every turn. If you deliberately change your behaviour in the present, you also change the future, which has unforseen consequences. My Old Ass doesn’t go very deeply into these possibilities, with Elliott’s big behavioural change being a more considerate attitude to her family – precisely the kind of wholesome message one would expect from a young adult movie. These sentiments are underlined by an appropriately saccharine musical score.
As Eliiott’s friends are ethnically diverse, and proudly queer, there’s a feeling of self-conscious “inclusiveness” that some – like me – will find cloying. When Elliott confesses her feelings about Chad, her friend, Ro says: “Just because you like a man doesn’t make you any less queer. I don’t think any less of you.”
Whew! What a relief! Imagine being stigmatised by your friends in a rural town because you come out as heterosexual. Unless the world has changed completely overnight, this must be the most enlightened small community in North America. Everything is soooooo vanilla, although there will be plenty of viewers who view banality and sentimentality as wonderfully poignant. As a thought experiment imagine this story set in one of those godforsaken hamlets in middle America, where families live in cardboard boxes, give their welfare cheques to evangelical churches, and wear MAGA hats. Such a tale would have more grit than this middle-class fantasy in which a pervasive niceness serves to normalise sex and gender issues that have become ideological red flags in less privileged communities.
My Old Ass is a primer in life’s lessons for those who’ve never given them much thought. It tells young viewers to be less selfish and assures them everything is going to be all right. It’s a feel-good story intended to soothe viewers’ feelings of anxiety at a time when many young people are looking at a future blighted by climate change, political extremism and lack of opportunity. It makes the awkward, confused years of sexual exploration into a fairy tale in which there are no boundaries or false moves. There’s an emotional manipulation at work that will be embraced by many – if not most – viewers, but beyond the queerness and the time travel, it’s a soap opera with scenery.
From soap opera to old-fashioned melodrama, The Critic is a slight but entertaining British film that rides on the back of a committed performance by Ian McKellen, as an aging, amoral drama critic for a London newspaper. Set in the 1930s, Jimmy Erskine (McKellen) is the legendary reviewer for The Daily Chronicle, known for his scathing put-downs of performances that fail to meet his exacting standards.
McKellen is now 85, and looks every minute of it in this role, in which he plays an evil old powerbroker who will do anything to hang on to his prestigious job. The trouble begins with a change of ownership, when Viscount David Brook (Mark Strong) takes over from his deceased father. David wants to modernise the paper and in Jimmy’s case, tone down the extreme invective for which he is renowned.
The crucial sticking point is an aspiring actress, Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), who Jimmy eviscerates for her performance in Webster’s The White Devil. David, who is also in the audience that night, is Nina’s longterm secret admirer. If this is not enough, Jimmy is gay, in an era when homosexuality is criminalised, and has a taste for rough trade. After he and his companion, Tom (Alfred Enoch), are arrested the paper has to bail them out. For David this is one step too far, and he gives Jimmy his notice.
When Nina goes to confront Jimmy about his withering reviews, he charms her and hatches a scheme to get his job back. His Machiavellian intrigues, accompanied by numerous quotations from Shakespeare, drive the story to a concluson that echoes and parodies high tragedy.
I won’t reveal any more of a preposterous, overheated plot, in which Jimmy grows more villainous from one scene to the next. As a career critic myself, I can’t say Jimmy’s style of writing or incipient megalomania, bear much resemblance to reality. I know we’re talking about London in the 1930s, but this idea about what a critic does, marks the story as a pure pot-boiler.
This is not to say that a pot-boiler can’t be highly watchable, thanks to McKellen, who hams it up relentlessly. Mark Strong is also good as David Brook, although he must be the most sensitive and dignified newspaper proprietor in recorded history. Rupert Murdoch, he ain’t. As for Gemma Arterton, at the age of 38 she is not entirely convincing as an aspiring starlet, but there’s little in this movie that feels realistic. At least director, Anand Tucker, doesn’t expect us to believe the world is a warm bath of niceness. Give audiences a villain to hiss – be it Shylock, Iago, Richard II or Jimmy Erskine, and they’re so much happier.
My Old Ass
Written & directed by Megan Park
Starring: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Kerrice Brooks, Maddie Ziegler, Seth Isaac Johnson, Maria Dizzia, Alain Goulem, Carter Trozzolo, Alexandra Rivera
USA/Canada, MA15+, 89 mins
The Critic
Directed by Anand Tucker
Written by Patrick Marber, after a novel by Anthony Quinn
Starring: Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Alfred Enoch, Ben Barnes, Lesley Manville, Romola Garai
UK/USA, M, 99 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 28 September, 2024