Thirty-year-old Mack Martin reluctantly joins a Palm Springs bachelorette trip for her best friend Carla, but then decides not to go to the event. Instead, the self-proclaimed homebody finds a pop-up tent and does a past life regression and winds up as her seventy-year-old self. Freed from the constraints of other people's expectations, Rita comes into her own, becoming an unlikely social media sensation, and sparks a tentative romance with Mack's dog-sitter, Jack.
Cast
Diane Keaton as Older Mackenzie "Mack" Martin / "Rita"
Principal photography began on March 25, 2021 and concluded on April 23, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.[8] Due to a limited production budget and the ongoing pandemic, several changes had to be made to the script during shooting, including the forced removal of a Coachella sequence due to the event's cancellation and combining days of shooting into one, as well as not being able to have chemistry tests between the actors prior to filming.[1]
Release
In April 2022, Gravitas Premiere acquired distribution rights to the film, and set it for an August 12, 2022, release.[9] The red carpet took place at the NeueHouse in Los Angeles, California in August 10, 2022.[10]
Reception
Box office
The film made $310,000 from 1,930 theaters on its first day.[11] It went on to debut to $1.1 million.[12]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 23% of 64 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Diane Keaton gives Mack & Rita her all, but this cloying comedy lets her down at nearly every turn."[13]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 49 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[14] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak gave the film a 61% overall positive score, with 46% saying they would definitely recommend it.[11][12]
Lisa Kennedy of The New York Times commended Aselton's "unexpected beats" as a director for capturing the "esprit de girlfriends" quality of Insecure, despite borrowing from Nancy Meyers' "rom-com catalog of upscale homes."[15]Nell Minow, writing for RogerEbert.com, gave credit to Paige and Milligan's performances but wrote that "[T]he film's promising setup and excellent cast are let down by a script so forgettable that even to try to summarize it is to feel it dissolve from memory."[16] Katie Walsh of the Los Angeles Times was also critical of the film's script, saying it "ditches character establishment and clear conflict for fish-out-of-water physical comedy and some vaguely affirmative lessons about learning to be yourself, unapologetically."[17]The A.V. Club's Courtney Howard and Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt both gave the movie an overall C+ grade, the former saying it followed the same "whimsical fantasy boilerplate" of the body-swap subgenre with similar themes of "confidence, regret and friendship" and the latter calling it "a body-swap comedy so daffy and weightless it nearly levitates."[18][19] Amy Nicholson of Variety called it "a bewildering generational culture-war comedy", criticizing the mixed messages on agism and the "underwritten" roles given to the supporting cast.[20]
