Keaton rises above sophomoric material in body-swap comedy
You have to hand it to Diane Keaton. At 76, she’s not afraid to embrace screwball comedy, pratfalls and all. What’s a shame, though, is that she doesn’t have a better vehicle for her comedic talents than the embarrassingly bad new picture Mack & Rita.
Just hearing the tired premise of Mack & Rita signals that we’re in trouble. The story is a body-swap comedy, in the vein of Freaky Friday, Big, and 13 Going on 30. Here, 30-year-old Mackenzie, or Mack for short (Elizabeth Lail, Gossip Girl), is an old soul, preferring vintage clothes, writing, and napping over partying with her gal pals, thanks to being raised by her beloved Grammy Martin (Catherine Carlen). That name, evoking as it does Grammy Hall in the superior Keaton classic Annie Hall, was probably meant to be a wink to Keaton’s fans, but, unfortunately, it instead only works to remind us that we’re watching a wildly inferior picture.
So back to that. As Mack tells us repeatedly, she feels like a 70-year-old woman trapped in a 30-year-old body, and all she wants to do is rest. She gets her chance when she stumbles into a “regression pod” run by Luka (Simon Rex, of Red Rocket, wasted here), and after the lights shake and flash, wouldn’t you know it: she emerges not as Tom Hanks or Jennifer Garner, but as Diane Keaton, in full eccentric fashion mode. The rest of the film is thin on plot, as Mack passes herself off as her “Aunt Rita” while trying to find the mysterious Luka and his chamber again to revert back to her old (er, young) self.
On paper, Mack & Rita probably sounded like a dream opportunity. Directed by Katie Aselton, who played one of Keaton’s daughters in 2018’s Book Club and whose indie cred seemed promising after her 2010 first feature The Freebie, Mack & Rita is stocked with a who’s who of Hollywood comedy. Taylour Paige (Zola) plays Mack’s BFF, bride-to-be Carla, whose sympathy for Mack’s predicament quickly turns to irritation when Mack can’t keep her commitments as Carla’s maid of honor. Dustin Milligan, AKA Ted from Schitt’s Creek, plays Mack’s bland but sweet neighbor and dog walker, who, naturally, wants nothing more than to hang with cool Aunt Rita.
And of course Carla’s mother Sharon (Loretta Devine) and her wine club (Wendie Malick, Lois Smith, and Amy Hill) provide instant new friends for Aunt Rita, cracking wise and dispensing wisdom when they hear of Mack’s situation. Martin Short even has a voice-over cameo as the voice of Mack’s dog, who talks to Mack-as-Rita during a mushroom-induced trip she undergoes in the hopes of reverting back to her original body.
Even for a body swap comedy, the film is exceptionally short on realism, starting with the fact that Mack’s body swap story is accepted pretty much instantly by those she tells it to. And nobody ever seems to question why Mack, an Instagram influencer, hasn’t posted at all from Scottsdale, where she is ostensibly on a writer’s retreat, house swapping with Aunt Rita. And that Aunt Rita would skyrocket to Instagram fame within a matter of days seems a stretch, as does the fact that Carla would spend so much time at her bridal shower with her mother’s friends and not her own
Aside from that, the script, by Brooklyn Nine-Nine TV writers Madeline Walter and Paul Welsh, also is full of conspicuous and distracting product placements, including a scene set at California Pizza Kitchen that feels like a commercial, with Aunt Rita outright declaring her love for the place. CPK must have given the production a lot of free pizzas.
The whole film has sort of a dashed off, after-school-special feel, with life lessons imparted along the way about being true to yourself and loving yourself at any age. That message falls a little flat, though, when Mack first emerges from the pod, looks at herself in the mirror, and wails “I’M OLD!!!”, as if there could be no more horrific fate than ending up in the body of 76-year-old Diane Keaton. The film wants to deliver a theme of embracing aging gracefully, but then it has Aunt Rita become the butt of jokes. Keaton is a gifted comedian, but when she’s belching after drinking a beer, hallucinating on mushrooms, or falling on the floor in a pilates class, is the film having us laugh with her or at her? That’s a fine line, even as Keaton wholeheartedly throws herself into the sillier material.
Kudos to Keaton for unabashedly giving this sophomoric picture a go, though, and treating it like it deserved an actress of her caliber. “You didn’t want to be old,” Mack is told at one point, “What you wanted to be was you.” If anyone’s a role model for aging without caring what others think, it’s Diane Keaton.
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Mack & Rita opens today at Bay Area theaters.
