Like Welcome to Collinwood, The OH in Ohio is a well-meaning but stilted movie taking place in my old hometown of Cleveland.
Parker Posey, the Queen of the Independent Pictures, plays a economic development executive for the city who’s so repressed, she’s never had an orgasm, although she’s memorized the number of times she’s had sex with her hangdog high-school bio teacher husband (Paul Rudd, who was Alicia Silverstone’s stepbrother Josh in Clueless).
She blames herself, though, for her orgasm-free life, and takes a new-agey sex-ed class taught by Liza Minnelli, who encourages the women, clad in white robes and standing at easels, to write down a pet name for their vaginas. In a cutesy script, Parker writes down “Vagina.” After careful consideration, she adds “My” above it. Later, with hesitation, she buys a vibrator at a sex shop staffed by an uncredited Heather Graham and before you know it, she’s a masturbation addict, and after nights on the town with various random men, a full-fledged sex addict.
The pinnacle of her satisfaction comes from a fling with local swimming pool magnate Danny DeVito, whose cheesy TV commercials she grew up watching and whose own pool has a waterslide so high, you can see the entire downtown Cleveland skyline standing atop it.
Meanwhile, Parker’s husband moves into the garage, then into an apartment building on what appears to be Euclid Heights Boulevard called the Manly Arms (that’s this movie’s type of humor, if you haven’t already guessed). There he has a fling with an overeducated student of his, played by Mischa Barton, who looks a lot older than her 20-year-old self. His midlife affair inspires him to clean up his act, as he gets in shape, trims his beard and dresses more sharply, but both his character and his storyline disappear mysteriously by the film’s conclusion.
I liked that one of his last scenes takes place in Vidstar Video, the tiny independent video store on Coventry Road that I used to visit nearly nightly when I lived in Cleveland Heights. There are many other great Cleveland locations in The OH in Ohio: another scene on Coventry by the parking garage, exteriors and interiors at Jacobs Field and the Frank Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building, and Cleveland Heights High School, which Jimi attended. These scenic touches revived memories both fond and pained among the Cleveland expatriates in our group, but the movie as a whole left us disappointed.