A film about a queer teenage girl who spends her 18th birthday tripping on mushrooms and meeting her adult self while high must be a wild comedy, right? That’s not the case for Megan Park’s “My Old Ass.” Her film is earnest to a fault. Its few attempts at humor, like a scene where Elliott (Maisy Stella) hallucinates herself performing onstage as Justin Bieber with her friends as backup dancers, feel out of place, but it comes up short by turning into a lecture about the importance of valuing the experiences of the moment.
“My Old Ass” takes advantage of its setting, a cranberry farm in Ontario during an overcast summer. (Elliott’s parents are the owners.) A vast lake dominates the countryside. Elliott (Maisy Stella) is spending her final summer there before leaving for college in Toronto in a month. She dates another girl but does not feel completely satisfied with the relationship for reasons she can’t fully pin down. On her birthday, she celebrates with her family and then goes out with her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler.) After they drink mushroom tea, Elliott imagines a visit from herself at 39 (out bi actor Aubrey Plaza in this incarnation, credited as Older Elliott). Elliott thinks she’s having a bad trip, but even after she comes down, she’s able to send texts to Older Elliott, listed as “My Old Ass” in her phone contacts. Older Elliott shows her the scars they share, inadvertently tells her that one of her toes will end up amputated, and warns her away from a man named Chad. Elliott grows closer to a teenage boy (Percy Hynes White). When she learns that his name is Chad, she wonders why she needs to remain distant.
Park shot most of “My Old Ass” outside in Canada’s Muskoka Lakes region. The location allowed the director to return to the region where she grew up, and the natural settings provide an antidote to a world addicted to technology. Her script proves to be flimsier than her direction. When the two Elliotts encounter each other, they speak in platitudes. First, one spells out the film’s message, then the other does so. These scenes don’t risk an iota of ambiguity. “My Old Ass” creates suspense around the importance of Chad to Elliott’s life, with the girl struggling with anxiety about why she should stay away from him, but the conclusions it reaches upon revealing its secret are preachy and underwhelming.
Aubrey Plaza has established a prickly persona in films like “Ingrid Goes West” and “Emily the Criminal.” Some of that remains in her portrayal of Older Elliott. She gives her younger self little concrete information about her life as a 39-year-old woman, but Plaza’s performance suggests that she’s not entirely happy. Plaza and Stella have a real rapport, missing from the film’s other performances. Their first scene together is the one where the film’s comic touch really works. Unfortunately, Older Elliott’s reappearance brings out the film’s worst qualities.
Unexpectedly, “My Old Ass” feels rather old-fashioned. Speaking about a generation whose interest in romance and sex is decreasing, it celebrates the life-shaking power of love. While it’s up to date on contemporary teenagers’ resistance to sexual identity labels and rightly points out that Elliott should make use of them only as long as they serve her, it’s a “story of reverse coming-out,” in the director’s words. As critic Mey Rude observed in a review for Out magazine, Elliott’s relationship with Chad is seen as the great love of her life, while her romances with girls are shown to be rather casual.
Coming after Park’s 2021 debut “The Fallout,” which tackled the subject of a girl who survives a school shooting, it understandably approaches adolescent life with a gentler hand. But there’s an unavoidable vibe that nothing real lies at stake: Elliott will be fine no matter what the film’s secrets her older self gives her turn out to mean. Celebrating living in the moment would be more urgent and joyous in a film less concerned with reassurance.
“My Old Ass” | Directed by Megan Park | Amazon MGM Studios | Opens Sept. 13th at Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn, AMC Lincoln Square 13 and Regal Union Square 14
