My Old Ass
“My Old Ass gives a welcome show of solidarity that doesn’t drive wedges between various LGBTQ identities.”
Title: My Old Ass (2024)
Director: Megan Park 👩🏼🇨🇦
Writer: Megan Park 👩🏼🇨🇦
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 4.75/5
My Old Ass follows Elliott (Maisy Stella) during the dog days of her final summer on the family cranberry farm in Muskoka, Ontario. On her 18th birthday, she goes out to the woods with her friends and they giddily trip on mushrooms—wherein Elliott hallucinates her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza).
After that initial night, the Elliotts continue to keep in touch over texts and phone calls. Director Megan Park makes the smart choice not to fall down a sci-fi rabbit hole. Instead, she uses this conceit to ask viewers an intensely personal question: What advice would you give your younger self? What changes to the past would you try to steer in order to better your life as an adult?
The ensuing feelings that both Elliotts grapple with are painfully familiar to many. We feel the manic anxiety of being a high school grad on the cusp of leaving home, ready to depart a rural upbringing for the big city of Toronto. We absorb the bruising aches of middle adulthood, when you’ve been around the block just enough to tread through life more carefully. Every conversation held by characters on screen echoes with extra layers, added by the viewer’s own life experience. This level of introspection doesn’t reach for sprawling or epic, and Elliott’s specific trajectory may not resonate with everyone. But if it does for you, Park’s movie burrows in deep and taps a bursting oil well of emotions.
18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) and 39-year-old Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) in My Old Ass. Photo by Marni Grossman © Amazon Content Services LLC
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
With a laser focus on its female lead, and written and directed by female filmmaker Park, My Old Ass clearly portrays a woman’s worldview. In addition, characters shift back and forth between the porous borders of traditional gender roles. Elliott’s farming family could easily have fallen into lazy stereotypes of a burly patriarch, a homemaker mother, and typically macho brothers. But Park balances her central family by borrowing some familiar characteristics (e.g., Elliott’s sports-loving brother and gruff father of few words) while subverting others (e.g., working-class parents from a rural area being supportive about Elliott’s queer identity). Even Elliott’s male love interest, Chad (Percy Hynes White), gets a delightfully gender-reversed scene as the “lonely girl” in a Justin Bieber music video spoof, wherein Elliott serenades a blushing Chad.
Demonstrating a further comfort level with modern sexuality, a key supporting character, Elliott’s friend Ro (Kerrice Brooks), uses she/they pronouns. Their pronouns don’t come up much, but when they do, they’re casually referred to by cis characters without any tiresome hand wringing.
Race: 3.25/5
My Old Ass reflects its predominantly white setting in Muskoka, where director Park spent her summers growing up—and where the largest ethnic group, Indigenous peoples, make up about 5% of the population. Accordingly, of the film’s 10 listed actors on IMDb, most are white. (Plaza has Puerto Rican heritage, but she passes for white in this film.)
Two characters of color do have supporting and minor roles. Ro, played by Black actor Brooks, has the positive (if rather typical) task of being one of Elliott’s two best friends. In addition, Elliott crushes on a local barista named Chelsea, who’s played by Alexandria Rivera, another actor of color. Elliott and Chelsea briefly date and are shown making out a couple times, but Chelsea has very few lines beyond that. Ultimately, the film casts inclusively, but it’s still centered from a white perspective and doesn’t have a narrative interest in topics of race and ethnicity.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
Viewers meet Elliott during a time of transition in her young life. Whether it’s going off to college or learning not to take her family and farming heritage for granted, she’s also experiencing romantic feelings for a boy for the first time. Not only is Elliott a proudly gay and out character, viewers also get to follow her journey as she parses new feelings and questions whether or not she’s actually bisexual, or pansexual. She doesn’t have her orientation figured out yet, but neither do plenty of people in real life. In an affirming scene between friends, Ro—who’s also queer—reminds Elliott that just because she’s attracted to a guy, “that doesn’t make you any less queer.” It’s a welcome show of solidarity that doesn’t drive wedges between various LGBTQ identities the way so many past (and current) films denigrate or sideline any sexualities that live outside the gay-straight binary.
Elliott (Maisy Stella) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) in My Old Ass. Photo by Marni Grossman © Amazon Content Services LLC
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.67/5
My Old Ass happens to match my own life on several fronts, so it wasn’t hard for me to get deeply invested. As a 39-year-old, I found older-Elliott’s description of love—“safety and freedom”—as rather profound. (And yes, I also felt her consternation at being called “middle-aged.”) I cried embarrassingly hard when Elliott’s mom (Maria Dizzia) recounts a bittersweet anecdote about 2-year-old Elliott growing independent, no longer needing to be rocked to sleep. (My 2-year-old toddler also needs me less and less every day, and that mixture of pride and sadness a parent feels at learning to let go is a potent cocktail.) And if you’ve lived through your teenage years, or if you’ve moved to an entirely new city without knowing anyone there, haven’t you also felt both anxiety and impatience at wanting to find out how the vast unknown would eventually make itself known?
These milestones hit on multiple levels, made exponentially stronger given the way Park’s script allows multigenerational versions of oneself (and one’s loved ones) to hold conversations with each other. The deliveries may not be especially subtle, nor the characters particularly nuanced, but My Old Ass still lands a sucker punch if you’re standing in the right place, at the right time, in your own life while watching.
Like My Old Ass? Try these other titles with touching mother-daughter scenes.
I’ll Be Right There (2024)
Tuesday (2024)
Janet Planet (2024)