When Aubrey Plaza’s been in movies like Dirty Grandpa, a title like My Old Ass would indicate a similar type of film. I’m so glad that this isn’t the case. My Old Ass is a thoughtful coming-of-age film about growing up and embracing the various seasons of life. The film is centred on Elliot (Maisy Stella), who’s leaving her family’s cranberry farm for college soon. She can’t wait to leave and experience everything that life has to offer outside of her hometown.
On a camping trip with her friends Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks), they decide to do shrooms together, to differing results. Ro and Ruthie get high properly, while Elliot instead finds herself face to face with her older self – the titular old ass. Older Elliot isn’t what Elliot expected of herself at 39 – she’s a PhD student and doesn’t have a family to call her own. She’s also sadder and not quite as excited about the world like Elliot is.
What I love about the film is that it doesn’t try to explain how Older Elliot manages to be transported to this time and space, or how the pair are able to continue this friendship beyond this drug trip. It’s very magical realism, and the film is richer for making this choice instead of attempting to rationalise things away with some pseudo time travel explanation.
Older Elliot encourages Elliot to not miss out on present experiences, while Elliot’s wide-eyed enthusiasm influences Older Elliot to look at the world with a less cynical pair of eyes. We think we know better when we’re older, but there are lessons to be learnt from our younger selves. We tend to look at time that’s past with regret and filled with all the things we never got to accomplish, as opposed to a meaningful time in our lives where we were impulsive and maybe even a little fearless.
Many films attempt to capture the voice of the young but fail miserably because the writers themselves are so out of touch with how young people actually speak these days. Director and writer Megan Park manages to circumvent these pitfalls; the film’s dialogue is so naturalistic and engaging. The characters have long, deep conversations and the dialogue flows in a way that feels authentic to them. The film also does a great job in tackling the complexity of sexual identity, and how you can be so set in how you see yourself in relation to the world, and then a person can come along and change all that.
My Old Ass has laugh-out-loud comedic set pieces, like one of the drug trips Elliot has – I won’t go into detail so as to not spoil the experience, just be assured that it’s hilarious and so relatable – or Elliot’s curiosity about what it would be like to feel up her older self. I do wish that Ziegler was a bigger part of the film – she was in Park’s previous film The Fallout which was great – but she livens things up whenever she’s on screen. Elliot’s friendship with Ruthie and Ro feels authentic as well – casual meet-ups for food whenever, and conversations that sometimes don’t go anywhere in particular but that doesn’t really matter because it’s the company that counts.
The film is meant to be a comedy – I think the title definitely suggests that – but the cast brings so much poignancy to the set pieces in the film. There are parts to this that are just completely devastating, and so well-acted by both Stella and Plaza that you completely understand and feel everything happening in those moments.
Don’t be turned off by the title and give My Old Ass a watch on Amazon Prime – you’ll be glad you did.
REVIEW SCORE – 4/5
