Grade: B
If I were a betting man, I’d have put money down that Of an Age’s opening scene would also have been its last. It’s a neat technique, used effectively in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Sean Penn’s The Pledge. At the end of the movie, what we also saw at the beginning now has context, makes sense, and we see it in a different light. As cool as that can be, it was even neater predicting that would happen in Of an Age, and then ending up being wrong. We don’t see that first scene again, nor does it happen at the story’s conclusion. We hear about it, roughly 70% of the way through. It’s one of a few fun ways the movie misleads us.
The film is split up into two acts, with the first – known as “1999” – taking up more than half the movie. The main action begins with a teenage girl, Ebony, waking up at dawn on the beach, alone and hungover. Fortunately, there is a payphone nearby, and a kind soul has spotted her the quarter (or I remember it being 35 cents that year) for the call. Understandably hesitant to call her mom, she telephones the “safest” person she knows: her best male friend Kol. They are dancers together, and she is freaking out because she doesn’t remember last night or exactly where she is, and they have finals for the big competition in a couple hours. At this point, I thought I knew where things were going. I figured this would be a screwball race against the clock to get to the theater, where they make it in the nick of time to kill it at this ballroom dance competition. But it was just a MacGuffin – a red herring, or a springboard to what Of an Age really ended up being about.
Kol rides in the car with Ebony’s brother Adam, to pick her up. This is where many of the movie’s best moments happen. I love it when characters aren’t robotically advancing the plot with systematic dialogue, but are allowed to just shoot the breeze, breathe, and BE, like Huck and Jim on the big river, or Jules and Vincent talking about the Royale with cheese. Adam is quite out about his homosexuality. Kol, not so much yet. But they really like each other, and make the most of their couple days together until Adam goes to school to work on his PhD.
The second act is known as “2010,” though it sometimes feels like the characters aren’t aware that 11 years have gone by. It’s like they’re watching the movie with us. Adam and Kol see each other for, apparently, the first time since ’99, when they come back into town for Ebony’s wedding. This is where Of an Age begins to resemble Call Me by Your Name. Both movies are about a brief, meaningful fling that unfortunately can’t blossom into something more, for some of the same reasons. The cast and crew bring a nice indie vibe to the proceedings. Performances are lovely, particularly Hattie Hook as Ebony and Elias Anton as Kol. He made me think of a young Tim Curry, with ominous eyes and teeth. In the end, not much is solved or resolved, especially after a character finds out a detail that surprisingly didn’t come up in conversation much sooner – but I admired Of an Age, and was grateful to get a glimpse of this indelible, memorable ripple in these two mens’ lives.
Film Reviews by Mark 
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