The emotional intelligence of Megan Park’s affecting coming-of-age story My Old Ass lies in the novelty of its framing device. Young Elliot (Maisy Stella) ingests some psychedelics and conjures Old Elliot (Aubrey Plaza) out of thin air. Old Elliot arrives with some sound advice about focusing on family and how to live a good life, and an ominous warning: don’t date some guy called Chad (Percy Hynes White). What’s evident is that this fun storytelling device, a gimmick in less certain hands, is effectively deployed here, as a catalyst for exploring an otherwise normative young adult story.
This is a fine outcome for a high concept movie. The high concept is not the plot itself but a delivery mechanism for it. Originality counts for something and whenever My Old Ass could go saccharine, the movie turns toward agreeable sentimentality instead, nostalgic for cranberry farms and young summer love, a decidedly Millennial remembrance of adolescence in bloom.
What’s most true about My Old Ass is that it operates from a place of affection. Characters love Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), dance to Justin Bieber songs, and refer to intercourse as Dick Sex. A real, modern teen movie, for adults.
Under all the new invention, this is still a moral tale for teenagers. It has to arrive at the moral lessons it’s designed to get to and along the way, has some tonal conflicts, and the plot sometimes slides out from under the weight of the framing device. It’s not especially interesting that so much of the conversation between Young Elliot and Old Elliot happens by phone, it’s just not a compelling way to visualize the information. And yet, it’s a perfectly good looking movie — Kristen Correll shoots the Canadian outdoors with love, returning after Park’s even more excellent Young Adult debut, The Fallout (2019); a movie that cuts through cliches and tropes and agrees more with its own genre. Where My Old Ass flatlines, it’s in the assemblage of disparate parts, as a teen movie and a high concept idea with many things on its mind, it at least arrives at the right kind of tear-jerking sentimentality that feels earned and not manipulated.
Megan Park’s filmography is developing credibly by grounding stories about young women in heartfelt emotionality that resounds beyond the depth of the screen. Park’s direction and writing do some lifting but the heart and soul of the movie is in the debut performance of Maisy Stella. What begins with a silly mushroom trip — it’s never how it looks in the movies, honest — develops into such a thoughtful exploration of the choices we make and whether or not we’d make the same choices if we knew the outcome. When it’s about love, what would you do?