Worth the Rewatch: My Old Ass (2024)

Aubrey Plaza sure is swell. She does make just about everything she’s in better. For example, Megalapolis. Then there are times when she finds herself among a cast with equally skillful actors and she can take it easy. Such is the case with My Old Ass which I rewatched recently. Really glad I did. It’s the very definition of a charming YA movie with a nice bit of magical realism, as well. That’s where Aubrey Plaza comes in. And the title.

It’s Maisy Stella’s Elliott who is the movie’s focus and Stella delivers a layered performance that fills Elliott out with all the complexity that comes with that moment of transition into adulthood. Aubrey plays Elliott, too, by the way. From the future. She plays 18 year old Elliott’s 39 year old self and even though neither actress resembles each other (young Elliott tells older Elliott that she looks more like their mother; “oh no! We do become our mothers!”)

This all happened on Elliott’s birthday when she and her pals Ro and Ruthie motorboat over to an island in the lake near their small town in Washington state to drop mushrooms Elliott is grossly disappointed as her friends start tripping. That is, until Aubrey Plaza shows up. Frankly, if Aubrey showed up as my older self, I’d be delighted (and I am decades older than her.)

Once older Elliott establisher her bonafides, so to speak, she takes younger E’s phone, and enters something into it. Cut to Ro and Ruthie loading up the boat and Elliott waking from the night before. We grow into Elliott’s world really organically. There’s nothing forced about her attraction to girls (she strikes up a hot and heavy fling with a local girl) or that her family has a cranberry farm or that she’s going away to college and might not be back for Thanksgiving or forever. And we easily accept that she’s receiving texts from her older self 21 years in the future. 

Older Elliott doles out the kind of advice that I never took; just be nicer to the people who love you. Listen to them and quit taking them for granted. This sounds cliche reading it, but it’s to director and writer Megan Park’s credit that all of this lands in the least preachy manner possible. Thanks to older Elliott who for much of ht film we could chalk up to being younger Elliott’s subconscious manifestation (okay, with a phone number…look, maybe disassociation is more concrete for Elliott…), Elliott does seem to wise up and things seem pretty good until her older self tells her to avoid a guy named Chad. Okay. But Elliott the Elder doesn’t divulge to Elliott the Younger why she should avoid Chad. 

When they do meet, Elliott is skinny-dipping and over subsequent meetings is rude to Chad at worst and weird toward him at best. The problem is that he’s a really nice guy. I mean really nice and older Elliott just won’t give up the goods. Things come to a head when Elliott can’t get hold of her older self and she and Chad have “dick sex”, a first for Elliott. To say more would be to ruin this sweet little film, the kind we rarely see enough of. 

If you remove the magical realist element from the movie, you’d still have an estimable narrative; but as it is, Park asks what it is that life asks for us as we mature and what can we give as we do. Elliott discovers that the farm has been sold and her father told her but she wasn’t listening. She’s saying good-bye to her childhood and the reason she won’t be back for Thanksgiving is because, well, you know; the farm’s not going to be there. She learned all this when she and Chad went with her brother Alex to play some holes at the nearby golf green. Alex told Elliott that their dad tried to tell her but everyone figured she just didn’t care about the farm. 

She and Chad talk about how quickly things change and how unnoticed those changes happen. They have an exchange about the last time you play pretend with friends and how, as Chad says, “you went home and parked your bike in the garage and went to bed, not realizing that was the last time you were ever going to get to do that.” For Elliott, the end of this summer will be something that she’s very likely to remember for so many reasons.

There’s so much to like about this movie but it’s mostly this consistent tone in the acceptance of change and the passage of time, particularly from everyone but Elliott. If there’s a point for conflict, it’s not between people; it’s between one young woman and time’s passage, and it’s handled deftly. 

The characters are, for the most part, well-drawn. Ruthie, even though she’s one of Elliott’s besties, gets short shrift, but Ro makes up for it, partly because we see more of her, but also because Kerrice Brooks seizes every moment and breathes life into her lines that otherwise might not leap from the page. Maria Dizzia similarly renders Elliott’s mother as the mother every kid would likely want and that most kids would take for granted (unless their older self came from the future and told them to pay attention.) But it’s Percy Hynes Whyte as Chad who does some of the heaviest lifting, giving us what older adults call “a very thoughtful, considerate young man”; but he just nails Chad’s decency without making him a simp. 

Kristen Correll’s cinematography supports the narrative by establishing a sense of place, of nostalgia for a past that hasn’t happened, and a sense of a summer passing all too quickly. She’s done second unit work and camera support on films like Nope and The Revenant and it appears that this is her second outing as DP after working on Park’s first feature The Fallout (2021). Normally, I tire of drone shots, but here they establish a zooming in from a macro perspective to the sense of familial and personal intimacy that underscores why we’re invested in Elliott’s tale. Could those drone shots also stand in for the wider perspective that older Elliott brings to her younger self or just that the journey into adulthood brings with it?