Our idea of time is all wrong. We assign meaningless words to describe how it behaves – it moves quickly, it stands still. We miss it when it’s gone. We can’t wait for it to get here. But in director Megan Park’s latest genre-bending coming-of-age comedy, time isn’t the problem, we are.
Or rather, our obsession with measuring it and our inability to simply enjoy it.
Appreciating the moment isn’t a particularly revolutionary concept for a film; there are plenty of feel-good dramas that have preached the same, but Park’s cheekily-named My Old Ass finds a way to, if not reinvent the wheel, certainly reshape it for a new generation. And that’s because nothing about the 90-minute comedy — not the way it uses star Aubrey Plaza, not its manipulation of time-travel, its tone, its ending, or its treatment of white dudes named Chad – turns out the way you might expect.
“It’s this combination of high concept sci-fi, but done in a kind of subtle, really heartwarming way,” Plaza explained when we spoke with her and her co-star Maisy Stella. “That’s what I really loved about it.”
Plaza plays the older version of the film’s lead, Elliott. She pops up early on, summoned by a haphazardly brewed mug of shroom tea to act as a sort of psylocibin-fueled ghost of Christmas future. (Yes, the film is set in the doldrums of summer in northern Ontario but, like with everything else about this premise, you just need to go with it.) She’s here to help (or haunt) her younger self, played by Stella, a singer and actress who previously starred on Nashville.
Where Plaza’s Elliott is slightly acidic, sharpened by life experiences her younger self hasn’t suffered through yet, Stella’s Elliott is full of hope and excitement for the future. She’s spent 18 years stalling at her parents cranberry farm, cruising the glassy waters of Muskoka in her rusty Tiller boat, and camping out on its wild islands with her friends. She’s on the precipice of something – adulthood, or at least the stepping block to it – and desperate to escape her quaint utopia. So, when the shrooms hit different and a 39-year-old version of herself appears, pleading with her to spend more time with her family, to soak up her last season of childhood, and warning against interacting with her dad’s new farmhand, she’s a bit disappointed. Her brothers are weird, her parents clueless, and she’s fairly certain she’s gay. What is this single, unemployed crone even talking about? But Plaza’s spirit guide just won’t go away, eventually putting her number in Elliott’s phone under the moniker “My Old Ass” to text vague warnings and even less concrete directions on what the young girl should do to avoid ending up like her.
According to Stella, this is where a lesser movie, one without Park’s uncommon insight into the look and sound of a generation not her own, would fail at separating itself from every other coming-of-age comedy out there.
“She just has a really crazy ability to write for this generation and it just comes very naturally to her,” the actress says. “She doesn’t really fall into the traps that I see a lot with movies for Gen Z.”
In My Old Ass, Park doesn’t use a wide brush to paint the younger gen as naive, impulsive, or ill-equipped to handle some hard truths. Her heroine isn’t self-absorbed or glued to her phone or ignorant of the world around her. In short, she doesn’t treat Gen Z with disdain or pity, she’s not here to fix them or change their singular point of view. Instead of placing the burden of enlightenment squarely on young Elliott’s shoulders, Park makes a case for why the older generations – Plaza’s character and anyone over 30 watching this thing – need to rethink their relationship with time too. Sure, youth often takes it for granted, but maybe we place too much importance on its passing. Maybe it’s not something to miss, to look back on in regret, to get stuck in like flies in honey. And having the benefit of it doesn’t necessarily make us any smarter or mistake-proof than kids like Elliott, so free and fearless and incapable of thinking past the moment they can’t possibly fear or plan for the future.
Part of why this argument for finding purpose in the present works is because of Stella, who’s so undeniably charismatic that even by placing her in every frame of the movie it still doesn’t seem like Park is giving her enough screentime. Decked out in baggy tees, Birkenstocks, and worn baseball caps, her Elliott is brimming with confidence and self-assuredness. She is snarky and sarcastic, empathetic and emotionally vulnerable. She’s self-centered to the point of bailing on the birthday dinner her family throws for her without remorse (or a text). But she’s also willing to learn, to change, to recognize her mother’s need to grieve her growing up, her siblings’ desire to know this version of her before she leaves and becomes someone else.
Even when she begins to question fundamental truths she believed about herself, like her sexuality, Stella manages to make everything feel authentic and unrushed. Her budding relationship with Chad – whose unnamed crime is definitely not what you think it is – is a sweet, strange kind of coming-out story, one that manages to avoid any stereotypical pitfalls. And by its end, the lessons Elliott’s learned via her “Old Ass” feel earned, and so much more meaningful because of it.
To hear Plaza and Stella tell it, the film came at critical times in their own lives. Plaza just turned 40 and she’s coming off a decade of working practically non-stop.
“I haven’t been on set in a while,” she says. “I’m trying to soak up normal, everyday life. I’m in that phase right now where I’m looking around going, ‘Oh yeah, what is my life?’”
While she takes pause, Stella is on the verge of breaking out. She just wrapped a project with Anne Hathaway due out next year and visited Sundance for the first time.
“All of this is very new for me,” she explains. “This is my first movie, so this whole experience meant so much. Everything felt really big.”
Like their versions of Elliott, time seems to take on a different meaning for both of them, though living in the moment seems to be a recurring theme of the film that even its stars have held onto.
“I’m more aware that we’re all getting older,” Stella says of her own summer, one she spent enjoying time with friends before life pulls them in different directions. “I’m really trying to just take everything in.”
Park’s comedy encourages us to toss aside the idea that we get wiser as we get older, focusing instead on the idea that every season of life holds value and that there’s freedom in not knowing. There’s also a chance to be kinder to ourselves in hindsight. Time, like life, isn’t linear. It doesn’t always need to be moving in one direction or another, and sometimes, it’s the stillness that can teach us the most.
‘My Old Ass’ is in theaters now.
