At a certain age, we start to wonder what it would be like to revisit our younger selves, with the foreknowledge we now have as adults: What advice would we give them? What decisions would we tell them to make differently? What regrets do we have, looking back at ourselves from decades past, and how would we fix them, if we could?
It’s the sort of conundrum that time-travel stories love examining, and their portrayals of the nature of time, either mutable from the past or fixed by the present, always influence the story’s ultimate lesson. My Old Ass, the new feature from director Megan Park (The Fallout) now in wide release, offers a spin on this kind of time-travel tale, focusing less on the endless battle between free will and the continuum, and more on why we choose paths that might be difficult or self-destructive in the first place.
It’s late summer, and Elliott Labrant (Nashville‘s Maisy Stella, dressed in an endless array of comfy flannels) is staring down the barrel of her last few weeks working on her parents’ Ontario cranberry farm before she heads off to college. During an overnight camping trip to their favorite island, Elliott and her two best friends take hallucinogens for the first time, hoping for visions of world peace and/or conversations with trees. What Elliott doesn’t expect is to summon her own self from 20 years into the future (Aubrey Plaza, acidic as always), who reluctantly offers some advice, and a warning.
Old Elliott encourages young Elliott to spend more time with her brothers and her mom, who, in her excitement for the future, she’s been neglecting, and warns her to stay away from anyone named Chad. Shortly afterward, young Elliott indeed meets the forbidden Chad (Percy Hynes White), a new kid in town who’s charmingly persistent, and realizes that staying away might be impossible.
For a time-travel story, My Old Ass is delightfully lo-fi. The drug-induced temporal convergence is never explained, and after that, old and young Elliott communicate primarily through phone calls and texts, the technological ramifications of which are also left unspecified. There are no time machines or heady debates about the nature of time. Most of My Old Ass is a more traditional coming-of-age comedy with a slight tinge of unreality. The cast interacts through snappy, choppy dialogue that often leans almost mumblecore, punctured by silly lines like “I can’t be a third-generation cranberry farmer,” and, later, an entire Justin Bieber musical sequence. When the time comes for more serious things, those scenes hit even harder.
Justin Bieber Gave Sundance Its Funniest Scene in ‘My Old Ass’
The only moments in which the movie stumbles is during a couple of monologues where the main characters must State The Theme, sinking into mucky platitudes—“The only thing you can’t get back is time”—rather than speaking like human beings. These moments are rare, and can be forgiven, if only because that sort of tired dialogue is easy to gloss over when the rest of the performances and interactions between the cast are so dynamic.
Interestingly, Elliott is gay, or at least she always thought she was. It’s an odd choice for a movie about teen romance between a girl and a boy, but instead of falling for the “lesbian who turns once she meets the right guy” trap, it sets aside a little bit of time to portray this phenomenon with the nuance it warrants. Young Elliott represents the version of herself that is not yet fixed into a pattern of character traits, and her suddenly fluid sexuality is treated as an extension of that youthful malleability. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, but in this case, it works.
The question of what advice you would give your younger self becomes moot when your younger self is too busy dealing with their own stuff, and too curious to stay away from mysteriously forbidden things. My Old Ass uses time travel as a lens to look at the tropes and traditions of a genre before spinning them upside down. In young Elliott’s case, it’s not a question of free will versus predestination. She’s still figuring those things out. For that, she has all the time in the world.
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