Always heed the advice of Aubrey Plaza
“My Old Ass” is a remarkable little movie that starts out fun and glib and then takes a turn into profundity. It’s so wonderful and unexpected, to have what seems like a little romp turn into something that can actually deepen your experience of life.
Like writer-director Megan Park’s previous feature, 2022’s “The Fallout,” it’s about a teenage girl, and it understands what it’s like to be that age.
Maisy Stella plays Elliott, who has just turned 18 and lives on a farm in an idyllic but isolated community in Canada. It’s the summer, and she’s looking forward to going to college in Toronto and beginning her life of bigcity adventure.
From the start, Elliott is not like the usual teenager we find in movies. She’s individual enough to seem like a real person, and to be, in a sense, the teenager we would all like to have been — rebellious but good-natured, with a spontaneous embrace of life.
One night, she’s in the woods with her two friends, having taken hallucinatory mushrooms, and lo and behold, her 39-yearold self appears, played by Aubrey Plaza. Unsure of the protocols for this kind of manifestation, Old Elliott is reluctant to give Young Elliott too much information about the future, but she does offer two instructions: Be nicer to her family, and avoid Chad at all costs.
That sounds easy enough. She likes her family, and she doesn’t know anybody named Chad. But then the very next day, she meets a guy, who turns out to be … Chad (Percy Hynes White). But he doesn’t seem like an ogre; he actually seems like a pleasant young person.
That becomes the conflict that Elliott must deal with for the rest of the movie. She wants to
trust her instincts, but her older self, who has told her so little, has been so emphatic on this one point that she has to take it seriously. And as viewers, we have to agree, because we see the difference between young, happy Elliott and sardonic, guarded, older Elliott. Whoever or whatever helped Elliott transform could not have been good.
Yet Young Elliott is a teenager, and we all know what teenagers are like: Whatever you tell them not to do becomes the one thing that they want to do, desperately. Impulse control isn’t a common virtue among 18-year-olds.
Plaza appears in only three scenes, a pair of fairly funny ones near the beginning, and then a rather serious one near the finish. Sorry, but when you talk about Plaza, you need qualifiers like “fairly” and “rather,” because this actress has a way of bringing darkness into lighter scenes and hints of comedy into the most heartrending moments.
Plaza is a marvel, getting better, richer and more interesting with every film, as if each role were an opportunity to reveal more of herself. Here’s someone whose stock in trade was and is comic sarcasm, who has now taken it upon herself to show the pain and injury behind all our elaborate gambits of self-protection.
If you want to see great acting that’s unadorned, not fancy, and very much in the style of 2024, see Plaza in the climactic scene from “My Old Ass.”
You will walk out of this film different than when you walked in, and a little bit better for the experience.