MY OLD ASS dir. Megan Park
by Morgan Stone
1/24/24 @ 10:00 am, Library Center Theater
The summer before college, bright-yet-irreverent Elliott comes face-to-face with her older self during a mushroom trip. The encounter spurs a funny and heartfelt journey of self-discovery and first love as Elliott prepares to leave her childhood home.
(via Sundance)
At the start of this film, I was unsure how they would make this story extend for an hour and a half. Elliot meets her future self within the first 15 minutes, and from there, I wasn’t sure where the film was supposed to go. By the end of the film, I was holding back sobs.
In My Old Ass, Elliot (Maisy Stella) is just 22 days away from moving away from her family’s cranberry farm and off to Toronto to start college and find what life has in store. On her birthday, she and her friends decide to take mushrooms to experiment, and Elliot ends up coming face-to-face with her future self (Aubrey Plaza). Her future self (her old ass) begins to give her advice, and they communicate over the phone even after the shroom trip has ended. What follows is a story of love, life, and finding out what matters to you.
One of my favorite scenes of the film involves a Justin Bieber lip sync to “One Less Lonely Girl” during a second shroom trip, and it was the perfect placement to provide levity within a film that was so contemplative.
I can tell that this movie won’t be for everyone, but it really got to me. So much of it is about fully taking in the moments we’re given, and accepting love whilst knowing that life is fleeting. It’s a sentiment echoed in hundreds of movies, and it also works here.
I personally identified with Elliot in a way. She reminded me of myself at that age and, while I know it wasn’t that long ago, I know that I’ve grown a lot since then. I, too, have a really hard time saying goodbye and worry that I’m taking people in my life for granted. You have to grow up to learn what’s important. Death isn’t talked about very overtly throughout the film until the end, but it’s definitely the looming cloud over the film. It has a lot to say about coming to terms with knowing that you will lose people in your life.
After sitting on it for a couple of days, I don’t feel that it was the most complex or that the characters were as fully formed as they could have been. Nobody is two-dimensional, but most of the supporting cast would have benefitted from slightly deeper writing. I also don’t have anything too distinctive to say about the technical filmmaking, which does mean it was quite competent, but not interesting enough for me to comment on it.
I have to give a lot of credit to all of the actors in this, however, because they did a fantastic job. I was convinced that the characters felt like real people who were living inside the screen. And oh, did they make me laugh!
What this film did succeed at was making me feel so much. It made me laugh harder than I expected, and I had to walk off the movie afterwards because I was crying so much. You could tell that there was a lot of heart in the production and that the team cared about making this movie simultaneously funny and touching.
This film made me want to run through the fields of my hometown and sing as loud as I can to old Justin Bieber songs.
But mostly, My Old Ass made me want to call my mom.
