(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the strangely discordant things that hit you as you reach the age where you’re old enough to think about cutting ties to your parents, physically at least, and forging your own own place in the world, and with it your own adult identity, is that just as you’re able to do that, you suddenly wonder if you really want to.
It’s an odd sensation – here you are, standing expectantly and with not a little thrill, on the cusp on the rest of your richly-imagined adult life, and you’re all of a sudden awash in nerves, uncertainty, and if you’re like this reviewer when his parents drove him up to start university study, all you want to do is get back in the car and settled back into the groove of the life you’ve been so eager to leave.
It makes sense, of course, change is always both a joy and terror in one fractiously exciting package; but when it strikes Elliott Labrant (Maisy Stella; as her older self, Aubrey Plaza) when she’s mere weeks away from leaving the gorgeous remote surrounds of her parents’ cranberry farm out in the middle of the pine-clad lake-filled wilderness of Canada, she has an encounter that upsets everything she thought she knew about kicking off the rest of her life (which, quite naturally, will involve a brilliant, a wonderful wife, and three kids).
It’s that very weird encounter that kicks off the gleefully-named My Old Ass, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2024, and while it’s off-the-wall as hell in the very best of ways, it unleashes a journey of discovery that transforms Elliott, her relationships with her family and how she views her impending departure to the University of Toronto.
It’s not a spoiler to reveal what that encounter is since it forms a central narrative plank of the trailer; on the night of her 18th birthday, as she does ‘schrooms with her BFFs Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler), Elliott begins low-key tripping when an unknown woman appears on the log next to her.
Given she and her friends are out in the midst of an island you can only boat to, Elliott is unnerved to have a stranger sitting around the fire with her, but she’s even more thrown when the woman says, without a hint of a smile or any sense of making a whole lot of sh*t up, that she’s Elliott in 21 years time.
Elliott, of course, and quite sensibly, doesn’t believe a word of it, especially when the woman, played with characteristic wickedly funny understatement by Plaza, admits to being 39 and in the midst of completing her PhD., anathema to Elliott who sees school as a just after high school and certainly not something you’d be contemplating doing in what she imagines is the full blush of fulfilling adulthood.
Her meeting with her future self, is something she in initially shrugs off but how do you just pretend something so extraordinary has happened and just move on?
Answer, you can’t: so Elliott begins to chat with her future self over her phone – yes, it’s all very Lake House but with tech, proving that, just like Doctor Who, you can speak on mobile/cell phones over time and space (but not within 100 metres of your house) – a series of conversations that sets in train some pretty sizeable but emotionally intimate changes in Elliott’s life.
It’s this emotional journey on which she embarks that shapes the richly funny and sharply poignant of My Old Ass which pivots off its out-there premise and delivers up a truly affecting film which explores with real empathy and thoughtful insight, what it is like to realise that life may not be quite as straightforward as you thought.
But here’s where writer and director Megan Park, really does something quite special; rather than My Old Ass simply being a sage lesson from an older self to the younger iteration, thus saving them from future harm and unhappiness, what happens is that the lesson learning is inverted and the younger Elliott imparts some hard-earned wisdom to her older self.
It’s a brilliant and quite moving twist, a love letter to the idea that while we accrue wisdom and maturity we age, that we also lose that willingness to jump into the chasm and see what happens.
We become risk averse, and while that’s kind of understandable since everyone invariably makes some reasonably scarring mistakes in their inexperienced youth, it can also rob of some really beautiful and life-changing things too.
Like, perhaps, discovering that rather just being a lesbian, which Elliott and her family have embraced with shoulder-shrugging gusto – it’s not something unusual, it’s just who Elliott is which is a joy to watch – that she may be bi or pan, as she falls for the summer worker on her dad’s farm, Chad (Percy Hynes White) who might be the very best thing to ever happens to her.
As she spends quality time with her two brothers, Max and Spencer (Seth Isaac Johnson and Carter Trozzolo) and uncharacteristically reflective and heartfelt moments with her mum (Maria Dizzia) – her dad does appear but he’s a little more incidental to proceedings – and begins to let herself maybe, possibly, who knows, fall for Chad, whom her future self has expressly told her to avoid.
Elliott heeds all her future self’s advice bar Chad who seems wholly lovely and caring and who can’t possibly deserve any kind of warning, surely?
Ah well, quite how that plays out must be left to the watching of My Old Ass, which is one of the most thoughtfully affecting and insightful films you will see this year, or perhaps ever, which is funny, clever,, both off-the-wall and groundedly, warmly human and which in its own gentle, nuanced and unhurried way, makes some pretty big points about her vantage points of youthfulness and older age, and that while the wisdom of the elder is worth heeding, perhaps some of the fearlessness of youth is worth hanging onto too?