What would you do if your 39-year-old self came back to give you life-changing advice about the future when you were a teenager? Would you heed such warnings? Or do you go un-chained and risk the somewhat likely possibility of heartache and despair? This is the splendidly imaginative and moving core of the narrative My Old Ass. Writer-director Megan Park glorifies youth in all its zeal and hope but equally just makes a sober assessment of the challenges of maturation. What is valued and easy to have can be easily lost. Time is an unyielding authority. Park prudently instructs to value one’s family and friends in the present.
Eighteen-year-old Elliott Labrant (Maisy Stella) is all bubble and trouble and this time, she is clad in a dinghy with her besties, till the boat hits the dock. It is in the few weeks that she plans to enter a Toronto college and has an important quest. Elliott is openly gay and even has a thing for the hot barista at the local coffee shop. Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) then convince her to have a random one-night stand. After that, the girls want to enhance her boat sex celebration with an spontaneous outing to the nearest island.
Elliott is camping with her mother (Maria Dizzia) and chooses to ignore her calls. She doesn’t even know her whole family is behind her with a birthday cake. Which is personally attached to Elliott loving her parents and two little brothers and eager to leave the dull cranberry farm behind. Ro brings out a packet of magic mushrooms for some psychedelic thrills. They are almost on the verge of choking while taking in the tea but wipe off the ambitious brosok expertly. Elliot stares at her friends as they grapple with the trip and wonder why its not working on her. But these mushrooms are in fact going to take her on another type of trip.
Doubt shall disappear in a fraction of a second when a responsibility was lingering over an older Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) appears next to her. That is not the case with Elliott who actually believes it, in talking to her older self, but rather exists and is LOLed at. Elliott’s shocked to find out she is not a wealthy businesswoman with a beautiful wife and kids and success that she so dreamed of. Why is it that Older Elliott cannot give her stock tips or something worthwhile for them to use and change their future positively? Older Elliott however doesn’t mind changing her future but there is just one crucial and quite extreme caution. Do not and I repeat, do not under any circumstance, go anywhere near, Chad (Percy Hynes White).
To Elliott’s surprise, she is in a compromising position with Chad the very next day. As it happens, the tall handsome college man has gotten employed on the farm this summer. Obviously, the pretty and energetic Elliott raises the hopes in him in no time. What is the best approach for a teenager to take on a task? Do it only to have her resist doing it and allow nature to take over. The problem underscores that love is one such distraction that Elliot cannot overcome. Why does this goofy guy pose a threat to what future-Centric Elliot would want to achieve?
TV Nashiville’s Stella and a Country Music star projects the Pain inside her during a beautiful performance in the second act. A gradual change in an emotional state of Elliott encourages almost every aspect of her logic’s emotional crew, including herself to antagonize truth. Any further interaction with the elder version of her character does not seem to add up since, both for simple easy recruit reasons and for implausibly – Elliot is not foraging for psilocybin for days or weeks. Friendship with him is simplified and it is described in detail and opened to the ugly truth of the situation. Elliott makes amends to the people she cares about including appreciation towards them. Her father and siblings transition from stupid pestering to someone she cherishes. But it is the increasing infatuation with the charming ‘I-don’t-meant-to-offends’ Chad that truly shakes Elliott’s confidence.
Park, who used to work as an actress in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, has a complex idea about sexuality. In Park’s script at this very early stage, there is supposed to be the Elliott criticizing straight couples and the domination of patriarchy as if it were a tiktok viral elder’s diatribe. The very thought that she could be infatuated with a character like Chad felt as the opposite of every principle she believed in. But on the other hand, there’s no way that Elliott would not be able to repress her strong affections for his character. Bi-sexual? Pansexuality? Gasp…OMG…what a shocking twist if she is rather a heterosexual! Nothing is straightforward for Elliott and she gradually learns that there’s nothing wrong with fluidity. For her not to miss the opportunity to get to do something great, she has to go beyond the limits of what she was earlier taught.
One does not need to be a genius to know where the narrative of Park’s writing is now headed. Everybody knows that this kind of strategy is self-defeating because it bursts on the readers in a painting that is like an emotional train wreck. Every joy of the youth comes with overtones that include tragedy. Sorrow, pain and suffering are unavoidable. They too are part and parcel of our existence. An elder Elliott, understandably, wanted out of the hopelessness and sought to see a way that does not have to participate in that feeling. That is your foolish endeavor and the lesson we learn from Park’s narrative. There will be more sad moments when Elliott reaches the point of understanding the very things she hid from herself, as well her valiant choices after the punch to the gut surprising revelations.
I, for one, My Old Ass, does not bother elucidating the details of Older Elliott’s zapping. Not attempting to lecture on the theory of relativity and other such lofty subjects courtesy of Park. The way they relate is important for the plot and should not be analyzed. It is poignant and honest. Oohhh, where is it possible to get some of those magic mushrooms?
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