On her eighteenth birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her two friends, Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) celebrate by taking mushrooms on an island in Muskoka Lakes, Ontario, Canada. When Elliott trips, she meets her thirty-nine-year-old future self (Aubrey Plaza), thus the title “My Old Ass” (2024). She advises her younger self to spend more time with her family and avoid anyone named Chad, who happens to be a guy (Percy Hynes White) working on her father’s farm. Will young Elliot take her advice?
If you are going to see “My Old Ass” for Plaza, maybe don’t. She is not on screen for long, and her part in the plot is top heavy. It may be a hot ten minutes. To enjoy this film, you better prefer watching a teenage coming of age romance with notes of poignancy, the most powerful element in the narrative. While writer and director Megan Park tries to spruce up a traditional story with a few curse words, some drug use, a supporting nonbinary character and some queer undertones, it ultimately is trying to make it revolutionary for a young woman to fall in love with a young man who will be the love of her life, which is a conventional story. The trailers hide these facts probably to make the movie more marketable to a broad audience.
In a heteronormative society, that story is not exactly groundbreaking. While bisexuals need more representation on screen, which Elliott is unclear if she is, it is a kiddie “Kissing Jessica Stein” (2001) where being a lesbian is a phase, but serious relationships are for heterosexuals. The script also ties itself up in pretzels to not use the L word and makes her apologize for essentially reverse sexism and racism to her brother, Max (Seth Isaac Johnson). Side note: I thought his name was Zach, but IMDb says Max so OK. To be fair, it is nice to have a character be a lesbian and/or bi/pan and for it to be a nonissue within the family. No hand wringing melodrama here.
It is Stella’s first feature film. If she appears familiar, you may recognize her from the TV series Nashville. She does her job. She is attractive with a perfect smile and not annoying, which is all that anyone can ask when playing a teenage girl given to a lot of dramatics early in the film. Elliott is a bit of a lothario hitting on the local barista, Chelsea (Alexandria Rivera), and her older self, but around Chad, she is shy, awkward and innocent. It also helps that at certain angles, White, who is clearly male, has feminine characteristics.
Chad’s defining characteristics are his helpfulness, his salt of the earth lineage and his hardworking nature. Some may consider him cute, but White will always vaguely remind me of that mutant kid from “The Gifted.” Ziegler and White have chemistry, but Park puts in overtime by giving them the most beautiful shots with the sun beaming behind them or having the two sit next to each other while watching a rainstorm. It is all very cute and insubstantial. “My Old Ass” also reveals how Chad’s history makes him the perfect match, so the nagging mystery for Elliott and the audience becomes what is wrong with Chad. Unfortunately, the romance is not the strongest part of the story.
While Park is valiantly trying to get young asses in seats, the heart of the story lies in the idea that starting an adult life also means saying farewell to the past. Even if no one dies, every day, there is a little death because it is the last time that Elliott will be doing certain things, and she does not know it. This theme was better explored in “Lady Bird” (2017). There is a solid old-fashioned television movie hidden in the premise. The best scenes are when Elliott reconnects with each member of her family. Max loves to golf and wants to run the family business, cranberry farming. Spencer has a crush on Saoirse Ronan and watches “Little Women” (2019), which Greta Gerwig directed along with “Barbie” (2024) and incidentally Mattel doll personified Margot Robbie produced “My Old Ass.” Elliott’s mom, Kathy (Maria Dizzia), gets a few scenes, but dad, Tom (Alain Goulem) barely gets any lines or screen time alone with the star. If any heterosexual male deserves an apology, it is dear old dad for getting the least quality time. He spends most of the movie sitting at the head of the kitchen table. They are the chilliest parents in the world—no yelling even when Elliott stands the family up on her birthday.
In a disappointing turn, the friendships are mostly vehicles to bringing Elliott closer to her older self, not examples of the fierce relationships that AFAB people develop, especially if they have lived in the same community for so long. Ruthie has no real characteristics other than she is the most gender normative female in the group wearing dresses, sporting long hair and cuddling wild bunnies. Brooks as Ro manages to sell a line that gives credibility to the heteronormative agenda of “My Old Ass” by stressing how unimportant labels are and reassuring Elliott that she is still queer. She also bears witness to Elliott tripping and imagining herself performing like Justin Bieber in concert, which will be fun for people who know what that looks like, but for the rest of us, will be a test of endurance to get through.
For the nerds in the audience, “My Old Ass” falls apart regarding the logistics of how two versions of Elliott can communicate, and older Elliott exist in the past and future. Plaza’s character is not a hallucination, and Parker borrows elements from “Frequency” (2000), but instead of a HAM radio, cell phones connect them. While Parker deserves applause for not giving in to tropes by prioritizing dystopian depictions or having characters get sick or dramatically die, Plaza is generally the strongest element of any movie. If the roles were reversed, and Plaza dominated the story, it probably would have broader appeal, but then the melancholic quotidian loss theme would not be as strong. After the first week, once people realize that Plaza’s role is powerful but limited, her fans will probably spread the word, which will hurt ticket sales. Still it was refreshing to have a type of doppelganger film that becomes a mutual mentorship and friendship instead of a hostile face-off like “The Substance” (2024).
“My Old Ass” is also a love letter to a quixotic, waning way of life: the family farm passed down through the generations, the beauty of boating around the lake and parking at docks instead of driving cars and enjoying nature while camping and skinny dipping. Usually, city life gets all the love in films or flicks extol the virtue of small-town life, but anyone who lives life next to a body of water will probably feel seen. It also sneaks in some punchlines about climate change and the declining fish population that are funny, which gives them an edge over “Twisters” (2024).
“My Old Ass” is “Bottoms” (2023) for the mainstream audience who wants to fool themselves into thinking that they are open-minded but were uncomfortable during the latter. There is nothing wrong with being basic, and it is unfortunate that the queer representation was so diluted that it almost circled back into becoming mainstream. Without the queer representsation, Elliott may not seem unique, but with it, it feels more like tokenism.
