Though My Old Ass is only her second film as a director, Megan Park has been making movies a lot longer than that might suggest, starting her career as a teen actor almost 20 years ago. This decade-plus of experience lends a gently beguiling confidence to her sophomore feature behind the camera, a sweet and funny coming of age tale that manages to balance slice-of-life teen drama with out and out time travel. It’s a combination that could easily sink a story, particularly one in live action (2016 anime Your Name did play a similar tune to perfection), but Park and her dynamite young cast keep My Old Ass as one of the most gently enjoyable films of the year.
Set in a bucolic patch of rural, lakeside Canada, My Old Ass follows Elliott (Maisy Stella), a queer girl who has just turned 18 and is mere weeks away from moving to the big city of Toronto for college. To celebrate her birthday, she and her two best friends take a boat out to a secluded island to take some hallucinogenic mushrooms and, hopefully, ‘expand [their] consciousnesses’. While her mates snooze and dance the shrooms off, Elliott has an altogether stranger trip, somehow meeting herself from 20 years in the future (played by Aubrey Plaza), who immediately starts offering up some hindsight-heavy life advice.
Park doesn’t waste time with any sort of explanation for exactly how this is happening; she’s got a strong enough handle on this story to know what it needs, and ‘rules’ and ‘science’ would just be distractions (though Plaza’s Elliott is from a distinct *future* – at points she bemoans stuff like the extinction of salmon or dystopian one-child policies). It all makes the magic of the premise much easier to just instinctively buy into, aided immensely by Stella’s wonderfully open lead performance.
Elliott is Stella’s first ever film role, but you’d never guess it. She anchors the whole film with warmth and confidence and the sort of megawatt smile that future movie star careers are built upon. She’s also, thanks both to her performance and Park’s effortless-seeming writing, that rarest of big-screen things – a teenager who speaks believably like an actual modern teenager, while still being very funny. Her and her friends have an easy, lived-in dynamic, and when she slowly starts falling for a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White), the first boy she’s ever had feelings for, the development of their relationship is perfectly paced.
Chad supplies the only real conflict of the film after old Elliott tells young Elliott to not fall in love with him without supplying an adequate reason, and the ‘mystery’ of this is My Old Ass’s only real weak spot, based purely on a frustrating lack of communication. Yet, this not knowing is, admittedly, a lot of the point that Park is making here. Whether it’s in Elliott’s budding romance with Chad or last-minute attempts to really connect with a family that she does really love but has taken for granted, My Old Ass is all about embracing what you have now, not what you did have, and not what might come later. It’s hardly an original message, but when it’s delivered with this much heart and this many laughs, it’s still one you’ll take home with you.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 