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 offers one piece of advice: avoid guys named Chad. Of course, Elliott meets the new guy on the farm the next day, and you know full well what his 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 the genuinely charming Stella 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 the standing ovation and open weeping at the premiere, I don’t think I was alone.
A very different kind of life transition is chronicled in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” based on the book by Amy Liptrot (who gets co-writer credit). The always-great Saoirse Ronan gives one of the best performances of her career as Rona, a woman who has to go to the literal edge of the world to fight her inner demons. Shot on the windswept islands off the Northern coast of Scotland, “The Outrun” is a reminder that Ronan is on the top tier of her generation, but Fingscheidt and Liptrot make structural and pacing choices that work against the quality work she’s doing here, jumbling the narrative unnecessarily and stretching the runtime past its breaking point.
“The Outrun” jumps back and forth in the life of Rona, mostly taking place on the Orkney Islands, which is at the tippy top of the United Kingdom. Rona has moved back there from London, spending time with her deeply religious mother Annie (an effective Saskia Reeves) and her troubled father Andrew (Stephen Dillane), who lives in a caravan on his farm, fighting demons of bipolar disorder mostly on his own. There’s a bone-deep loneliness in Rona’s life as she feels judged by her mother and often pushed away by her father. An early scene in which she just tries to go hang out with a stranger who helps her light a cigarette is a heartbreaker with Ronan deftly capturing her character’s deep well of sadness.
Rona knows she’s in this situation because of her own behavior. She’s an alcoholic. Through multiple flashbacks, we learn of the mistakes that Rona made at school in London, ones that led to the break-up of her relationship with a charmer named Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). A night of extreme violence after too much drinking pushed Rona into rehab, but it’s hard to stay sober in the middle of nowhere when there’s nothing else to do.
Saoirse Ronan gives another deeply felt performance, capturing so much of Rona’s emotional journey that it’s disappointing how much the script feels the need to play games with this acting turn. There’s no reason not to tell this story in a linear fashion other than to keep some of Rona’s more upsetting behavior for the final act. The film is so constantly jumping around in time that it loses the emotional power it could have had just sketching the development, rehabilitation, and daily battles of alcoholism. Ronan’s performance will keep people engaged, especially those who have fought this disease themselves, because of how truthful it feels, but the film around it feels like it doesn’t trust its leading lady or the audience enough to truly showcase it.
Finally, there’s the odd duck that is “Little Death,” a film from the NEXT program that proves that if you try to make two films at once, you’re really just making two half-films. Without major spoilers, music video director Jack Begert has made a film that starts as one story before making a hard-left turn into an entirely different film in tone, character, and style. Both films are thematically connected by addiction, and the point could be that our current pharmaceutical crisis impacts people of all classes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the two halves didn’t really work together to form a whole as much as leave me wanting more.
At first, “Little Death” is the hyperactive, self-aware, overly precious story of a screenwriter (David Schwimmer) who is struggling with just about everything. He’s kind of started to hate his fiancée (Jena Malone), almost hoping that the mole on her neck is cancerous, and he’s fascinated by the dreams he keeps having of a mysterious woman (Angela Sarafayan). He’s working on a screenplay about a writer, of course, and “Little Death” becomes meta in the sense that it sometimes feels like what we’re watching is the screenwriter within the film’s final product. When the studio agrees to finance it if he changes the gender of his largely autobiographical story, “Little Death” really digs into yet another commentary on how hard it is to be a white middle-aged dude in Hollywood. Yes, it centers how we don’t need another one of those, but it’s still largely one of those.
And then it’s not. Without spoiling how, “Little Death” becomes the story of two young people (Dominic Fike and Talia Ryder) who get caught up in a drug-fueled nightmare involving a death, a stolen dog, and a missing bag. Dropping the heavy style of the first half, Begert actually makes a better film here, but it’s still half a movie, and one that needed fleshing out in a few places and maybe a bit of recasting. Every once in a while, you see a movie where it feels like one performer is in a very different project, and that’s the case with Talia Ryder (co-star of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”), who’s so good that one wishes she could just walk into a different film. Maybe a complete one.
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