'My Old Ass' Tells a Messy Gen Z Queer Story
Are the kids gonna be alright?
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My Old Ass is a quiet film that packs a punch. Maisy Stella plays Elliot, an 18-year-old girl enjoying her final summer in an idyllic Ontario town. Planning to attend college in Toronto in the fall, Elliot is itching to get away from her cranberry-farming family and onto bigger, brighter things. While celebrating her 18th birthday with friends, Elliot trips on mushrooms and hallucinates (or does she?) her 39-year-old self, played by the wonderfully sardonic Aubrey Plaza.
Elliot continues to converse with her older self (her old ass, if you will) for the rest of the film, as 39-year-old Elliot gives 18-year-old Elliot advice on how to live. Most of the advice seems sound – appreciate your family and where you came from, for one – though young Elliot balks at older Elliot’s advice to avoid a seemingly harmless guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White). I won’t spoil what happens next except to say that we get to watch Elliot learn to balance what she has with what she wants.
Director Megan Park, a former actor best known for her role in The Secret Life of the American Teenager, excels at depicting a specific kind of Gen Z mentality that feels naturalistic and live-in rather than try-hard. This applies to both the characters’ youthful worldviews and the film’s novel, relaxed take on queerness, which gives the movie much of its charm and approachability.
A Gen Z mindset, if there is such a thing, is often characterized by a sense of nihilism, mainly due to the world-ending effects of climate change and the never-ending cycle of global unrest. Unlike previous generations, Gen Z hasn’t grown up with images of a hopeful, optimistic future. This idea that the future is not promised can produce a sense of freedom – if nothing matters, then nothing matters. While it still exists, the world is your oyster.
A kind of gallows humor emerges from the state of the world today, something older Elliot brings to the table once she arrives on the scene. Older Elliot often makes remarks about how much worse the future is, noting, for example, that you’re no longer allowed to have three kids where she comes from. It’s not clear if she’s being serious or not – in part due to Plaza’s deadpan delivery – but later in the film we hear some sort of siren in the background as she talks to young Elliot, indicating that maybe the future really is a barren wasteland.
Despite these hints of apocalyptic imminence, Elliot remains somewhat insulated from the worsening conditions around her. She moves through the world with brash confidence, unaware that the people in her life her might be struggling, or feeling differently than her. Perhaps this stubborn propulsiveness is a logical response to the sense of uncertainty many young people are faced with today, or maybe it's just Elliot’s selfishness. Either way, Park graciously gifts us a character who is as sympathetic as she is frustrating, someone who can move audiences across generations despite her timely specificity.
Gen Z stories tend to be supremely messy, and tinged with an undercurrent of grief. That approach is much more than an undercurrent in Park’s debut feature, The Fallout, which follows two teenagers (Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler, who also appears in My Old Ass), in the aftermath of a school shooting. That film is more literally about today’s social and political problems, though it hones on the micro, rather than the macro, effects of such violence.
In both films, the issues at hand remain unresolved, even if attempts are made toward closure. Perhaps it's this pervading sense of uncertainty, the lack of assurance that youth today will be afforded the same opportunities as their parents. At the same time, there’s an effort made by the teens in both films to avoid the stultifying pitfalls of adulthood, the notion that, as Ally Sheedy claims in The Breakfast Club “when you grow up, your heart dies.” To stay alive, literally and figuratively, is a central concern for these characters.
What is not a central concern for these characters, despite society’s obsession with identity and labels, is sexuality. Both My Old Ass and The Fallout depict queer characters existing and/or coming into their queerness without an abundance of drama. In The Fallout, Vada (Ortega) develops feelings for Mia (Ziegler) amidst their attempts to cope following the shooting. Their burgeoning relationship is sweet, despite the circumstances, and though there is a brief coming-out-esque scene with Vada’s mom (Julie Bowen), the question of her sexual orientation pales in comparison to the looming specter of violence and its aftermath.
In My Old Ass, Elliot is a cocky, swaggering queer teen. She wears Birkenstocks with socks and backward baseball caps and drives her dinky motorboat with abandon. She has a crush on the local barista, and her dreams come true when they hook up on her boat. Stella, it should be noted, is magnetic in the role, embodying Elliot’s more hubristic characteristics with dazzling charm and sincerity.
One of the standout scenes in the film comes when Elliot trips on mushrooms a second time in an attempt to re-conjure her older self. Instead of seeing Plaza, Elliot finds herself in a hallucinatory Justin Bieber performance, where she is Biebs and Chad is the girl he brings on stage to serenade. The next day, when Elliot tells her friend Ro (Kerrice Brooks) what she experienced, she reveals she was obsessed with Bieber in that era not because she wanted to be the girl who received a rose, but because she wanted to be Bieber himself. This explains everything we need to know about Elliot, who embodies so much of young Bieber’s swagger and style. It’s the character’s origin story.
Teenagers have always been messy and experimental no matter the era, but this film deposits us in a place where this kind of chaos is acceptable. In this case, Elliot experiences almost a reverse coming out when she meets Chad. Having been out as gay for her entire adolescence, Elliot is shocked to experience any attraction to a man. When she discusses this revelation with Ro, she admits she’s not sure what this means for her identity – is she bisexual? Pansexual? – and Ro reassures her that it’s okay to be uncertain.
Elliot’s sudden confusion about identity turns out not to be a huge deal for her, in part because no one around her cares which gender she dates. It’s certainly a sign of the times to see a character so confident in her queerness that the notion she might be into someone other than women is what’s shocking. That this character feels believable is a hopeful thing. Queerness is a part of Elliot’s coming-of-age journey, but it’s who she is, not something she has to reckon with or overcome. She already loves herself, at least to a point – what she needs to learn is how to understand herself and her place in the world better.
The queerness in My Old Ass is even more meaningful when you consider the fact that both leads are out as queer themselves. (Plaza told The Advocate she’s into both men and women in 2016, and Stella, it seems, recently confirmed her relationship with Bella Ramsey.) This fact is not necessary for the project’s success, but it reminds us that queer folks are more than just characters on screen.
My Old Ass falters most in the final act, when it reveals the reason behind older Elliot’s advice to her younger self. But this slight pivot towards melodrama at the end doesn’t undercut the film’s warmth or its emotional resonance. Ultimately, it’s a moving, funny, sweet, hopeful, queer story that gives its characters room to be weird and annoying while still loving them.
The future is not promised to young people like Elliot, but the film reminds us there is still hope. You can find hope in accepting yourself and others, and through connection and reverence for the people and places around you. This may not stave off the inevitability of a tragic future – as Elliot learns from her older counterpart – but it can make the world around us a little sweeter.
My 19-yo gay daughter will likely hate that the gay girl in the movie falls for a guy. She feels like depictions of lesbians are so rare. In fact, I think she feels the existence of lesbians is so rare especially in college where every girl says they are bisexual, but seems to date men. It sounds like a very interesting film though!
As usual, your writing is excellent. In this review your tenderness toward these characters definitely made me want to see the film. Thanks