Megan Park’s My Old Ass could have been a delightful and unique addition to the queer coming-of-age genre. During her last summer at home before going to college, Elliot (Maisy Stella) meets her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) while doing shrooms. Older Elliot’s advice to Young Elliott comes twofold: Spend more time with your family, and avoid a guy named Chad. Needless to say, Elliot does not take the latter part of the advice, embarking on a teenage summer romance with Chad, a boy working at her family’s cranberry farm.
The premise itself is a fascinating exploration of one’s inner child: What would you say to your younger self if you could give them advice on anything? And would your younger self even listen? Watching Stella and Plaza riff off one another as the same character ages apart was delightful. The humorous chemistry between them is palpable, and enjoyable to watch. However, what begins as a promising tale of exploring love and queerness, and the joy and fear inherent to the passage of time, ultimately falls short of expectation.
Elliott’s coming out story is unique in terms of cinematic representation. She begins the film a confident lesbian, bragging about having slept with many women including another girl at camp (who we see maybe twice, and who lacks any depth to her character). However, when she meets Chad, she realizes she is falling for him, which is completely outside of her other sexual and romantic experiences. Taking this approach to the character’s queer journey is not the issue for me—it is an underrepresented portrayal, and a reality for plenty of young bisexual/pansexual girls (and boys and non-binary teens). The issue for me is that until over halfway through the movie it seems like Elliott’s queerness is an innate, but innocuous, aspect of her character. I was thrilled that her bisexuality was obvious, but not made a plot point in a typical tragicomic fashion of many coming out films. I thought it fresh and exciting to see this premise with a queer character without the queer part being what brings the conflict to the relationship and the plot. When I was revealed to be wrong, it didn’t come as a shock to discover that Elliott previously didn’t identify as bisexual — her crude vocabulary and baggy shorts scream “teenage fuckboy lesbian” — but it did come as a disappointment. Disappointment, that is, in unclear, sloppy storytelling. Sure, I could take the visual cues from her characterization, but a masculine-dressed girl does not a lesbian always make. [Insert photos of me from high school.]
While I find the idea of documenting a young girl’s journey into her bisexuality as a refreshing, exciting exploration, the poor storytelling and narrative structure of the film left me with some concerns. For some viewers — especially those who do not identify as LGBTQ+ — the story could be seen as the narrative of a young lesbian “just finding the right guy.” There is a scene between Elliott and a friend of hers named Ro (Kerrice Brooks) in which Ro validates Elliott’s queerness as a malleable force that is allowed to explore itself and change, but the scene is so quick and muddled with Gen Z slang that it feels like an afterthought. Older Elliott does mention smoking her girlfriend’s weed at one point, but the comment is very quick and could be easily missed, or forgotten. There is also an uncertainty in Elliott regarding her attraction to women, where she finds herself distanced from those experiences and unsure of what she “really wants.” Cue Chad, a cisgender heterosexual man (Percy Hynes White, whose allegations of sexual assault and racist tweets also left a bad taste in my mouth when Googling him after this film). The setup for this relationship can greatly imply to the untrained viewer that Elliott’s lesbianism is a folly of teenagehood, and her first love being with Chad an indication that she has come back around to men. Again, what could be an energizing representation of bisexuality/pansexuality, instead through clunky storytelling comes across as lesbophobic.
Outside of its takes on sexuality, the execution of the story itself is rather bland, which is disappointing considering the fascinating intention. Older Elliott tells her younger self to cherish her family, and Younger Elliott listens. There’s no true conflict, no sense that Elliott is actually learning anything. The stakes therefore feel low or nonexistent. And in falling for Chad, her older self is scarcely to be seen to give more advice, and so again Younger Elliott’s decisions feel hollow, and without much weight behind them. There’s no true conflict in the story, and all of the emotional beats feel less like gut punches than reading the outline of a script yet to be written in full. I noticed which moments were meant to make me feel sad, angry, happy, but I didn’t actually feel any of those emotions. In one such scene, it is revealed to Elliott by her younger brother that her parents are selling the cranberry farm they have had for generations, and didn’t think to tell her because they didn’t think she would care. But, from the beginning of the movie, Elliott is very involved in her family’s life at the request of her older self, and so we don’t witness any of the actual conflict of her detachment, and therefore the reveal that should hit us as viewers as deeply impactful falls flat.
This similarly happens with the reveal of why Older Elliot wants Younger Elliot to avoid Chad. As a viewer, I knew this was meant to be a gut punch. But instead, I rolled my eyes. It felt like a copout — what is an easy way to hit the “drama button” for a movie? The moment feels cheap, especially considering the story up to this point has not earned our emotional involvement.
While the intent of the film — to show our older selves that the choices we make are inherent to our humanity, and should not be sought to be changed unless we change who we are — is beautiful, the execution is at best sloppy. While Stella and Plaza’s chemistry and individual performances were quite enjoyable, the film itself is a miss for me. If I could talk to my younger self, I’d tell her to skip it.
My Old Ass is now in theatres.
