Directed and written by: Megan Park.
Starring: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White.
Runtime: 88 minutes.
‘My Old Ass’ a clever coming-of-age tale with heart and wit – and on ‘shrooms
It’s an age-old philosophical question: What advice would you impart to your younger self if adult you, with all the scars and hard-earned wisdom of adulthood, could reach back through time and connect with your wide-eyed, idealistic teenage self?
Would you tell 18-year-old you to study harder in school? To stop taking your family for granted? To invest in the stock market? The winning lottery numbers?
Or would you drop ‘shrooms in the woods and dance?
There’s room for both in “My Old Ass,” a coming-of-age comedy as irreverent as its title written and directed by Megan Park, the 38-year-old director of “The Fallout” who clearly remembers with keen acuity what it was like to be 18. Here, she’s able both to channel the naïve optimism of adolescence and the battle-hardened weariness of midlife to explore weighty philosophical questions about aging, fate and self-determinism with bittersweet cheek.
Elliott (Maisy Stella) is 18 and bursting at the seams to leave her childhood in the dust. The queer tomboy, feeling constrained by rural life, is blazing through her last summer on her family’s bucolic Canadian cranberry farm before she leaves for university in big-city Toronto. She’s had her fill of fruit-filled bogs and tractors and annoying little brothers, and ditches family dinners as the days tick down to her departure to zip around the lake in her motorboat, make out with her number one girl crush and take psychedelic mushrooms in the forest with her friends. So far, so 18.
But psychedelic mushrooms mean psychedelic trips, and it’s during one of these that Elliott encounters a strange 39-year-old woman in the woods. She has Elliott’s same brown doe eyes, her same sardonic wit, her same name – in fact, she claims, she is her, from the future.
Old Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) wisely refrains from interfering with the space-time continuum or Young Elliott’s joy of discovery – she won’t tell her younger self which stocks to invest in or any winning lottery numbers. Pressed for any piece of intel, Old Elliott only says, with wariness in her voice: Stay away from a guy named Chad. He’s bad news.
No problem, thinks Elliott. She’s only interested in kissing girls, anyway. What on earth would she ever want to do with some guy named Chad? But then suddenly a gangly summer worker on the cranberry farm has her questioning her life, her sexuality, her relationship to her family and their cranberry farm – and why on earth Old Elliott would warn her away from the gentlest, funniest, sweetest boy she’s ever met. (And she doesn’t even like boys!)
That you never deeply question the logistics of “My Old Ass” (especially as Young and Old Elliott continue to text each other across the void of space and time) is a credit to Stella’s charm as the profanely charismatic Elliott. She plays Elliott like a rocket gearing up to blast into orbit, a teenager on the cusp of young adulthood who can’t contain her craving to suck the marrow out of life. She wants to fall in and out of love, to have her first threesome, to sing and dance and sometimes do drugs. Confronted with her older self, she asks if they can kiss – you know, just to see what it's like.
It’s easy to see why a young woman so full of life would feel let down by the woman she grows to be. Here she is, ready to set the world on fire, only to discover she grows to be a middle-aged woman who takes yoga classes, who looks a little beat down and a lot sad.
“I thought I’d be happier at 40,” Elliott says.
But what makes “My Old Ass” a coming-of-age tale unlike any other isn’t just the time travel and ‘shrooms (or the riotously funny Justin Bieber musical interlude). It’s the understanding that we are, all of us, at every phase of life, “coming of age.” It’s not just Young Elliott learning how to live – it’s Old Elliott, too.
And you, whatever age you are. “My Old Ass” will make you remember who you were at 18. Will make you realize, even, that teenage you still exists on some cosmic wavelength with some lessons left to teach.
No ‘shrooms required.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
