Director Megan Park delivers a sophomore effort co-starring Aubrey Plaza that’s heavy on cliché and light on depth.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
A variation on a theme of the dreaded body-switching movie, writer-director Megan Park’s weak sophomore effort “My Old Ass” (the school-shooting drama “The Fallout” was her debut) presents us with a young woman on the threshold of adulthood (yes, it’s also a coming-of-age film). Her name, which is not explained, is Elliott (actor-singer Maisy Stella). She is slightly estranged from her Canadian family, like all adolescents. When we meet her, she is 22 days from leaving for college in Toronto and still working on her family’s Ontario cranberry farm (the film was shot in the Muskoka District, aka “the summer playground for Toronto’s elite”). Elliott lives with her vaguely unwell mother (Maria Dizzia), whose name we do not know, her father (Al Goulem), her minimal brother Max (Seth Isaac Johnson), whose most notable trait is that he plays golf, and her likable, Saoirse Ronan-obsessed younger brother Spenser (Carter Trozzolo). Elliott is gay, and her best friends are Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks), who are severely underdeveloped.
When we meet Elliott, she is piloting a rowboat with an outboard motor and clumsily bumping into things on her way to a camping ground where she and her friends drink a ‘shroom tea and experience the effects. In Elliott’s case, she meets her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza, who is in the film for about 15 minutes). Ro and Ruthie have conveniently wandered off stoned, we assume (and have not been eaten by bears). Elliott’s older self has a lot to say to her younger counterpart. Most of her older self’s advice involves being nicer to her family. But the older Elliott, a PhD student in an unknown field, insists that her younger self avoid anyone named Chad. What do you think is going to happen?
Of course, in the next scene, younger Elliott meets a “summer boy worker” on her family farm named…wait for it…Chad (lanky, red-headed, Canadian Percy Hynes White), who is apparently so nice and desirable and not at all dorky that Elliott experiences sexual attraction to a man for the first time.
Have you drifted off yet? I did almost, well, maybe more than almost. Aside from its title, “My Old Ass” is like a Canadian version of an edgy indie film. Elliott has gay assignations with a worker (Alexandra River) at a local coffee shop. At regular intervals, we get that indie standard, a generic pop song, to mark a point in the development of Elliott’s not-very-deep consciousness. She is nicer to her mother (Dizzia appears to believe she is playing Blanche DuBois on a stage). To her distress, Elliott learns that her parents are selling the farm, something she is against, even though she plans to live elsewhere. Director Park makes it clear that Elliott works hard on the cranberry farm and can handle the tractors and other machinery. But “My Old Ass” otherwise reeks of entitlement.
Elliott will discover that, although her older self does not reappear for a time, her young self can contact her other via time-traveling (I’m guessing here) texts and phone calls. Yes, she tells her older self that she has met someone named Chad. In one of the film’s worst sequences, Elliott imagines herself as Justin Bieber performing the 15-year-old song “One Less Lonely Girl” and handing out roses to an adoring female audience. After sex with Chad, Elliott has an identity crisis. Is she gay, bi, pan, or (horribly) straight? No one seems game to explain Elliott’s mysterious fluidity. I wish I cared. One of the film’s two credited composers is the director’s husband, actor-musician Tyler Hilton. Perhaps, the most important lesson of “My Old Ass” is to “wear your retainer and moisturize.”
‘My Old Ass’
Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, and sexual material.
Cast: Maisy Stella, Maria Dizzia, Aubrey Plaza.
Director/Writer: Megan Park
Running Time: 89 minutes
Where to Watch: Sept. 20 in Boston; Sept. 27 everywhere
Grade: C+
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