Stream It Or Skip It?
My Old Ass (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is a sneaky charmer of a movie, a combination sci-f/coming-of-age teen time-travel sort-of-comedy that wriggles from the grasp of easy description. It also features a breakout lead performance by Maisy Stella (Nashville), with support from the ever-lovin’ Aubrey Plaza, both playing the same character at different ages, who, what with one thing or the other, end up meeting each other. I know, right? Writer/director Megan Park follows up her strong debut, The Fallout, with a high-concept small-drama that might just make you weep a little bit.
MY OLD ASS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Elliott (Stella) is freshly 18. She’s leaving for college soon. She’ll work on her family’s rural-Canada cranberry farm for the summer and then it’s off to Toronto to begin The Rest Of Her Life. She’s having a fling with the hottie girl at the coffee shop that she gets to by taking her boat up across the gorgeous lake and down the beautiful river to a burg, pop. 300. And instead of having 18th-birthday cake with her parents and younger brothers, she and her besties Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) camp out for the night to brew some psychedelic-mushroom tea. This is all very typical teenager shit, but absolutely specific to that brief moment of transition from childhood to adulthood where one does adultish things with a still-childish brain with some self-awareness of how this moment exists at the inflection point between the past and the future.
But before we get too heavy, the key plot thing here is that tea. Ruthie almost recognizes the inflection point when she suggests they make a plan in case their trip goes awry. “What if one of us gets too high and says something f—ed up and it changes the fabric of our friendship forever?” (Note to Ruthie: the fabric of your friendship is changing forever whether you say something or not, you just don’t realize it yet.) Anyway, Ro’s trip finds her in her own little world, dancing. Ruthie falls off a log, and I think I saw a string of drool hanging off her lip. But Elliott? She sits there like when is it going to kick in and then Aubrey Plaza plops down next to her like she manifested out of thin air. And when Aubrey Plaza reveals that she’s the 39-year-old version of Elliott, well, it seems as if the mushrooms are working.
There’s a bit where Elliott-18 and Elliott-39 joke about how they don’t look at all like each other, then they get to the deep stuff. No, Elliott-39 isn’t going to tell her how to game the stock market. But she gives advice to her younger self: Don’t take your family for granted is an obvious one, because it’s something every teenager does without being aware of it. And the second bit of wisdom-from-the-future is, avoid someone named Chad, and when Elliott-18 asks why, Elliott-39 is cagey, and the implication is, sharing wisdom-from-the-future may be dicey for philosophical human-development reasons and stability-of-the-space-time-continuum reasons.
Got all that? You don’t really need to have it. The movie works just fine without miring us in details, and that’s one of the things that makes it good. One amusing development: When Elliott-18 wakes up, she finds Elliott-39’s number in her phone contacts – and for reasons unknown, they can talk and text, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that triggers time-space-continuum roaming charges. One inevitable development: Elliott-18 meets Chad (Percy Hynes White, Wednesday), and he’s cute and their chemistry is sweet and bubbly. Well, shit. She’s not supposed to be doing this. For some reason. And now Elliott-39 isn’t answering her texts. Being ghosted is one thing, but being ghosted by your future self, well, that’s extra rough.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Time Cut sucks where My Old Ass very much does not suck. I also assume the murky time-travel communique is just an updated version of the magic mailbox from The Lake House. It also brings to mind a teen indie-romance a la The Spectacular Now mixed with a YA weeper, but without the latter’s cheesier elements.
Performance Worth Watching: Stella creates a rough-around-the-edges character who’s authentic and lovely in all her assets and flaws.
Memorable Dialogue: Elliott-39 drops a doozy of a brainbender: “This isn’t going to be the last time you get exactly what you want and then realize it isn’t what you wanted.”
Sex and Skin: Clothed humping and makeout sessions; some bare buns.
Our Take: My Old Ass is an almost-breezy thought experiment where Park posits a big idea – what would you tell your younger self, given the chance? – within a fairly typical coming-of-age story. There’s emotional, spiritual and philosophical complexity within the conceit, but it never takes precedence over the character. And Stella kinda makes us fall in love with Elliott, who’s smart and spirited and very much her own self; without the film’s emphasis on her performance, we might be bothered by the how-and-why mechanics of the quasi-sci-fi setup, or by the familiar elements of the romantic coming-of-age content. Park isn’t trying to be profound, she’s telling us a story about this one, unique individual, and using the high concept to ruminate on the bittersweet qualities of parenting, letting go, saying goodbye and change in general.
The result is a movie that’s funny, smart and sneakily poignant in its heartbreaking affirmation. One detail that stood out to me: Elliott learns that her parents are selling the farm – a farm full of bogs, mind you, in this context a symbol of fetid stillness – and she finds herself torn between wanting to leave this home and wanting it to be there forever in the event of her return. It’s a difficult life lesson for Elliott to learn as she navigates the relationships in her life, playing golf with her middle brother, encouraging her youngest brother’s Saoirse Ronan crush (we feel you, kid) and wondering if this Chad fella is a serial killer or a heartbreaker or, more likely, something more fraught and complicated. The performances are consistently thoughtful, the drama never overwrought and the comedy never feels forced.
Notably, Plaza has something between an extended cameo and a supporting role here, and her interactions with Stella are delightful, layered and light like a fluffy bundt cake. At its heart, My Old Ass feels inspired by Richard Linklater’s films, which explore our perceptions of the passage of time through experimental structures and funny, crisply written characters and dialogue. Elliott-39 just wants her younger self to know that time seems to pass like molasses when you’re young, and like a rocket when you’re older – but there may not be a better place to be than right here, not regretting the past or worrying about the future, but living in the spectacular now. Sounds like terrific advice.
Our Call: My Old Ass is fresh and new and not at all like ass. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
