Hey, kids! Don’t do drugs, or you could wind up in a rom-com that doesn’t make any sense but still has moments!
Or something like that.
In the new film entitled My Old Ass (let’s be honest; there are going to be SO many ways to handle the words around this title, and none of them won’t make me shake my head), Maisy Stella (Nashville) plays Elliott, a young woman planning to leave her small town in Ontario for the big city of Toronto, trading in life on her family’s cranberry farm for college. On her eighteenth birthday, she and her two best friends decide to have a campout and take some magic mushrooms to see what happens. While Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) have their own experiences, Elliott doesn’t feel like anything is happening until she “summons” her thirty-nine-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). And then, stuff happens.
Going into this film, I was intrigued by the premise. Asking the question of what you would (and would not) tell your younger self if given the opportunity is actually something I have pondered quite a few times, but in this case writer/producer/director Megan Park (HBO’s The Fallout) doesn’t really make it work for the hour-and-a-half that this film runs. There are at least a few scenes that only seem to serve as “time fillers” to get to that feature-length run time, wearing the premise thin without really picking the pace back up.
On the bright side, what this film lacks in story more than makes up for in performance. This truly is the younger Elliott’s story, and Stella (who hasn’t had an acting credit since Nashville, which floored me) handles it like a champ. From the spirited happiness of leaving small-town life behind to disbelief about her older self showing up and all of the feels that come after that, her performance is one that knows exactly how to elicit the exact emotions at the exact right time not only from her character but also from the audience, evident by the reactions of the audience around me during the screening that I attended.
There will be some that will argue that Plaza is not used as much as she should have been here, but on the whole, I think her role was right about where it should have been. The older Elliott’s place is more about keeping things moving when it comes to her younger counterpart’s curiosity and the decisions she makes than it is about where she “currently” is and what she is doing. There is a strange bit with the two of them in the third act that disrupts the concept of the film itself (including a reference that I seemed to be the only person in the theater that did not catch or laugh at), but Plaza does what she needs to do in this script and also further proves how good she is at knowing when the spotlight should be on her and when it should be deflected to her co-star.
If the year ended today, this film would wind up just outside of my Bottom Ten, but there is plenty of time for other films to put some space in there. Since it currently isn’t there, it’s guaranteed not to cross that barrier, so it’s got THAT going for it. Honestly, this would have been better served as a one-off special for a streaming service that could be broadcast with commercials at the one-hour mark in order to trim up the fat and tell an interesting story about the questions we ask and the consequences that could come with them should we try to change our fate.
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