Review: My Old Ass (2024)
My Old Ass (2024)
Written and directed by Megan Park
Even before I got out of my teenage years, I noticed that every time I tried to write a story about a teenager, that character would always be exactly one year older than me. It’s natural — you write about things you’re curious about, not about what you already are. The same goes for your reading habits. No 12-year-old ever read a story in which the main character was their same age. You already know what it’s like to be 12; what you really want to know is what it’s like to be the grand age of, say, 15.
So any movie about an 18-year-old about to go off to college is a movie for youths 13-16. Mid-teens who consume any material about what it’s like to be an older version of themselves because they want to know what being that age is like. The fictional 18-year-old can drive, can vote, and in some states can buy a drink.
Oh, wait, that’s no longer true. The drinking age in Texas was 18 when I turned 18 there 50 years ago. The way I heard it, the thinking was that if you were old enough to get sent to Vietnam, you were old enough to buy a beer. In fact, 30 states lowered the age because the 26th amendment had lowered the voting age to 18.1 I guess changing the drinking age turned out to be a bad idea in the end, because by 1988 it was back to 21 everywhere. You’re welcome.
Also, I take back what I just said about any movie about an 18-year-old about to leave for college is a movie for younger teens. Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” (2017) is about that very subject, and is very much for an adult sensibility.
But that gorgeous film aside, “My Old Ass” is very much for mid-teens. It spends huge gobs of time lionizing the liminal last summer before college of its protagonist Elliott (Maisy Stella), a cheerful, attractive girl who has wholesomely grown up on a cranberry farm in… Ontario? It’s a bit unclear, but the dialogue clearly sets it in Canada — a beautiful pine-covered, hilly/rocky, and lake-abundant place in Canada2 — plus she’s due to go off to college in Toronto. The world of the movie is confined to the farm, a lake, its island, the family’s faux-rustic house overlooking the lake, and, quirkily, a golf course.
It’s not so much that mid-teens aspire to this bucolic setting (though their parents certainly might) as it is a matter of subtracting anything commercial, or ugly, or quotidian from what is essentially a dream world. Early in the film, her mother (an especially wan Maria Dizzia) counsels Elliott that she should imprint the scene of her childhood upon her memory before she goes off to college, so perhaps we could ascribe the perfection of the environment to Elliott’s nostalgic memory, even though there’s no I-am-looking-back-from-later-in-life framing device suggesting this.
No, the story isn’t a flashback. But there is a weird temporal angle. Elliott and her two besties go camping on the island specifically to get high on shrooms, and while tripping, Elliott somehow summons her 39-year-old self, ably played by Aubrey Plaza. (Since the two are supposed to be the same person at different ages, I’ll just refer to older-Elliott as Aubrey.) This older self seems only a little surprised to be there, and they handle the situation with aplomb (“Should we kiss?”). Young Elliott begs for information about the future, but aside from a few dark comic references to the coming climate catastrophe (“Salmon? Man, I miss salmon. There’s no more salmon either”) Aubrey refuses to give details, except for one thing: “Avoid anyone named Chad.”
Of course, the next thing that happens is that a slightly older youth comes to work on the farm, and is named Chad. And what follows is an entirely predictable summer romance which, given Aubrey’s warning, Elliott tries reasonably hard to fight, but Chad really is perfect boyfriend material: he’s not beautiful, he’s very handy with almost any mechanical or physical task, he is respectful of everyone. Parents would be forgiven for wandering off during the middle act.
While all the courtin’s been going on, Elliott has somehow (Aubrey: “I don’t know how it works!”) been texting, and sometimes talking, with Aubrey on her phone, with the 39-year-old self continuing to warn her against Chad. But then, it seems, she ghosts Elliott, who plunges ahead without counsel. That means more memory-gathering around the house and the farm, a task made all the more urgent when she finds out that her family is selling the farm and this is the last cranberry harvest. While that thread is elegiac, the romance finally gets to the making-out stage.
Finally Elliott consumes a bunch of shrooms again in an attempt to summon Aubrey. And this is when the adults are welcomed back into their seats, because the climax of the whole thing is guaranteed to raise a few tears for mom and dad (or you, adult viewer).
Aubrey, having eaten a huge amount of weed (at least cannibas hasn’t gone extinct in the future), manifests.
And… I was going to tell you what happens after that, but it would ruin the ending for you. Sometimes I just plunge ahead and spoil the ending because I want to make an argument in which knowledge of the ending is required. But this time I won’t — because I truly enjoyed it. The great ending made sitting through the stuff aimed only at teens worth the effort.
I’ll just assert that Aubrey Plaza is a great actor, and manages the scene brilliantly and with almost no dialogue. And she is the reason that you could do much worse than watch what is otherwise a pleasant teenage romcom with your teenager, or even on your own. Plaza makes everything she is in — even a competent but otherwise standard teen movie in which she appears in maybe 20% of the picture — better. I will see anything she appears in.
Aubrey Plaza movies previously reviewed in this space:
Three Jeff Baena-directed films starring Plaza: Life After Beth, The Little Hours, Spin Me Round
Four early Natasha Lyonne movies, including “But I’m a Cheerleader,” featuring Plaza
Damsels in Distress (just a cameo, but again, the best thing in the movie)
I agree with all of this so much! Started to lose me in the middle, and you helped clarify why. But that ending!!! I was weeping. <3