As someone who grew up on a farm, I’ll always empathize with any fictional character who yearns to get away to a place with culture, people, and streetlights. Do I miss getting up at 3am to bottle feed lambs in a snowstorm, and the undeniable sense of isolation? Not at all. But are there moments when I wish I’d taken more time to appreciate the mist over the fields, or the times before adult pressures? Absolutely.
Every adult goes through those emotions as they get older, of realizing that not everything their teen self sought to flee was so terrible. It’s why the idea of receiving life lessons from your older self is such an alluring narrative conceit. Whether it’s balding Biff Tannen trying to beat the betting odds or Joe convincing his younger self to save the world in Looper, it’s always wish fulfillment in a very specific way. It’s the adult trying to stop the younger self from being an idiot, as 39-year-old Elliott (Plaza) bluntly tells her 18-year-old self (Stella) while she is tripping hard on mushroom tea. With only 22 days left before she leaves the family cranberry farm to go to college, early Elliott is sprinting for the door with all the teen angst and ambition she can muster. Her more seasoned self asks one question: What’s the rush?
Writer/director Megan Park follows up her debut feature, the South by Southwest award winning high school shooting drama The Fallout, with another look into the lives of teenagers. But whereas her first film took a suffocating dive into the emotional extremes of their inner lives, coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is sweeter without being cloying. That’s why My Old Ass doesn’t so much play with time as fiddle with it, using the fluttering passage of the years in the same ways as The Lake House or The Notebook, either of which it would double-bill with well.
That all seems at odds with the premise, which threatens to be a heavy-handed Freaky Friday-esque farce. But while there are laughs to be had, they’re gentle; Plaza has long jettisoned her Parks and Recreation mugging to camera. Instead, here she displays a genial, kindly friendship with her younger self as they bond around a campfire. The exact mechanism for her sudden appearance is never really explained – some people just have a bad reaction to drugs – and rather than some hyperbolic warnings from the future, she comes bearing fortune cookie words of wisdom for her younger self. Hang out with your brothers, relish farm life, smell some roses. Which, contrary to the way such narratives usually go, Elliott does. That timely advice (combined with her sole dire warning to not sleep with some mysterious guy named Chad) is what really gives My Old Ass its touching yet bittersweet heart, as young Elliott tries to take her older self’s advice while trying to work out who Chad is, and why she should steer clear.
While it’s being sold as a sassy buddy comedy, My Old Ass is really a romance centered around Stella. Vitally, the Nashville star doesn’t just fill out Elliott’s internal conflicts with humor and pathos; it’s one of those rare times in modern cinema where an actor looks convincing on a farm. Much as Emilia Jones looked like she really knew her way around a trawler in CODA, Stella feels at home in a tractor or netting floating cranberries. Of course she’s a little hazy about temporal mechanics and ethics, but that’s OK: My Old Ass is all about the heart, not the head.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.
