Looks Pretty Good to Me

My Old Ass a movie by Megan Park.  With Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maria Dizzia.  Streaming on Amazon Prime.  *****

I tend not to like movies about time travel.  I don’t like gimmicky movies in general (a contemporary teenager goes back to the fifties and is at a total loss because they don’t have I-phones.  There’s an idea for a movie.  A sure hit).  My brother-in-law loves movies (especially Japanese anime) where they travel forward in time a thousand years and confront “a universe so amazing it’s unreal.”  That’s the whole problem, as far as I’m concerned.  Such movies tell me nothing about the world I inhabit.

My Old Ass (one of the great titles of all time) is the exception.  Elliott (Maisy Stella) is a young Canadian woman who has grown up on a cranberry farm and is heading off to college in Toronto in the fall.  She doesn’t dislike the farm, or her parents, or her two rather goofy brothers.  She’s just looking forward to having her own life.  She’s a lesbian, and has two close friends and confidants (Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks).  She’s also rather gaga over a woman who clerks at a local store, and they get together on a regular basis.

A factor in the experience of watching this movie is that Maisy Stella is the most adorable actress I’ve seen in years.  She doesn’t seem like a performer, just a beautiful young woman with a winning personality.  Another factor—this movie has a lot going for it—is that the story is set on a series of lakes in Canada, where Elliott has her own little outboard, and it’s idyllic, a dream of a place to go.

On an evening when her long-suffering family is waiting to throw a surprise party for her (they’ve even baked a cake), she sets off with her friends to a local island and ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms.  The girls drink them in tea, a method I hadn’t heard of, and the mushrooms produce different effects in each of them.  For Elliott, she’s suddenly in the presence of her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who possesses the old ass (still rather shapely) of the title.  There are things that are immediately funny about this situation.  Her older self tells her with some delight that she is a PhD student, thinking it sounds exciting, and the younger Elliott is utterly disgusted (“I’m still in school at age 40?”  “I’m not 40,” her older self snaps back, a joke that keeps recurring).  The young woman also doesn’t like the way her future self looks, though Aubrey Plaza is beautiful.  She’s just not nineteen years old.

Old Elliott gives her some standard advice, which any of our older selves might have said: pay more attention to your mother, she’s not so bad.  Pay attention to your brothers, they look up to you though they pretend not to.  Don’t, in other words, be looking forward to the future so much that you neglect the present, because you’re about to leave home forever (unbeknownst to younger Elliott, her parents are about to sell the farm because they got a good offer.  She’ll come back from college and her whole life will have disappeared.  They hadn’t told her, because she’s never seemed interested in the farm.  Still, she thought it would always be there).

Then Old Elliott gives her the one piece of advice that sounds weird: if you run into a guy named Chad, avoid him at all costs.  She won’t say why.  Just avoid him.

Chad (Percy Hynes White) soon shows up.  He’s a college student—she eventually discovers he’s at the same college she’s headed to—who has come back to help on the cranberry farm because his grandfather did that kind of work and he wants to see what it’s like.  He’s friendly, polite, and curious, another winning personality.  He’s not as good looking as Elliott; who could be?  (I hate it when both leads are terribly good looking.)  He’s obviously attracted but not obnoxious about it.

Elliott puts him off at first, having been warned by her older self.  We figure the guy must be a serial rapist or an ax murderer or something.  But he’s around a lot, because he’s working on her farm (the way that suddenly seems to be happening seems strange in the film.  As does the fact that Elliott doesn’t know her parents are selling).  He offers to fix the outboard of her boat, because it’s been giving her trouble, and his father fixes motors for a living.  The guy’s so sweet she finds herself attracted, though that’s never happened with a guy before.  One thing they talk about—a major theme of the movie—is the way time is suddenly passing so quickly and they can’t hold onto it.  Everything is disappearing.

An odd feature of the situation is that Elliott can still talk to her older self, who has left her number on her cell phone.  Her old self is terribly alarmed that Chad is around, and that her younger self has been hanging out with him.  Just when Elliott begins really to be attracted, she can’t reach her older self, who has gone on a meditation retreat (plopping her old ass onto a cushion).  By the time they get back in touch, it’s too late.

One wonderful thing about this movie—as my wife pointed out—is that it’s a serious movie about a young woman’s life.  You seldom see such a thing.  It’s a coming-of-age movie about the very moment when you come of age, such a poignant time.  But it is also about the human condition, the way we don’t notice how precious that moment is, or any moment (maybe old Elliott found out on her meditation retreat).  The work of art that this most reminds me of is “Our Town.”  My wife agreed.  But as she pointed out, this movie manages to be lighthearted and funny about the whole thing.

It’s a work of art, actually a profound work of art, but a lot of fun as well.  It’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime.  I’ve never been so glad to have it.