Today's My Birthday. Let Me Talk to You About 'My Old Ass.'
After reading my recent essay on Paranoid Park, one of my oldest friends texted me to say, teasingly, “You’re such a sucker for coming-of-age movies.” It gave me pause. Why would he say that? I’ve never thought of myself as having any particular affinity for the genre. But then I looked back at my other essays, and I saw that pattern that he saw. Over the the past year, I’ve written about The Spectacular Now, River’s Edge, Dazed & Confused, Pump Up the Volume, The Virgin Suicides — all of which fit coming-of-age conventions to varying degrees.
None of this was conscious on my part, but it’s hardly surprising given the stated terrain of this newsletter (“film and memory”). My plan for this little endeavor was to revisit those sticky films and indelible scenes that had come to roost in my mind. It’s inherently a backward-looking project.
And then there’s also my current station in life. As a parent to a teenage daughter and a tween son, I observe and advise how they paddle through the choppy waters of adolescence. Moreover, until 2022, I was an educator for the better part of my career, surrounded by young people. I confess to being fascinated by my former students: the politics and norms of fitting in, the way some kids act as if they’ve got it all figured out while others seem like they might never.
And then there’s the unavoidable fact of my middle age. I turned 45 today, which means that tomorrow I will be officially closer to 50 than I am to 40, nearer to retirement and death than anything approaching youthful vigor. This along with my father’s death two years ago are contributing factors, I’m sure, to my recent tendency towards reflection.
Which brings us to My Old Ass (2024), Megan Park’s very funny second feature film that quietly worked its way on to several critics’ year-end best-of lists. I recently watched it for the first time. As the end credits crawled up the screen and the tears streamed down my face, I thought: Dude was right; I am a sucker for coming-of-age movies.
My Old Ass concerns Elliott (Maisy Stella), a teen determined to make the most of her last summer before college. Unlike many protagonists within this genre, Elliott is not awkward or bookish, not hemmed in by self-doubt or preoccupied with what others think of her. She is what one might call a “big personality,” acerbic, self-possessed, openly queer and sexually assertive. For her 18th birthday, she and two friends enjoy some mind-altering mushrooms while camping. During her trip, Elliott encounters a middle-aged version of herself, played by Aubrey Plaza. Young Elliott is suspicious of the older woman’s claims, mostly because they don’t look particularly alike, but the interloper’s knowledge of biographical details and a comparison of some unique physical traits confirms her claims.
Young Elliott pleads for information about the future, but the elder Elliott declines. Her one piece of advice, with no context as to why: avoid anyone named Chad. Later, the older woman stores her number in the teen’s phone, should she ever need advice. Oh, how she does!
Enter, of course, a Chad (Percy Hynes White), a college student who has to come to work Elliott’s family’s cranberry bog for the summer. Despite her efforts to avoid him, Elliott is instantly intrigued by Chad, as is Chad with her. The film establishes straight away that she is, and likely has long been, comfortably out of the closet and forward with her desires. Thus, her attraction to Chad is not merely “inadvisable”; it amounts to a full-fledged crisis that forces her to question her sexuality and sense of self. We’ve seen many coming-of-age films wherein a character reckons with emerging or repressed queer desires, but My Old Ass inverts that narrative by centering a protagonist who is surprised and confused by her intruding heterosexual longings.
Grace notes abound throughout the film. Cleverly, writer-director Park constructs key moments between Elliott and Chad as callbacks to earlier teen romances. Elliott first encounters Chad, for instance, while he happens to be swimming in the same lake in which she skinny dips, calling to mind the exact same setup between the Reese Witherspoon and Jason London characters in Man in the Moon (1991).
Likewise, Park stages a key scene late in the film in a boathouse, which recalls a similar one between Kristy McNichol and Matt Dillon in Little Darlings (1980). These are just a few examples of how carefully Park has considered how her film dialogues with the genre’s past.
In addition to these teenage romances, I can’t help thinking of My Old Ass in relationship to another genre: the body-swap comedy. These movies concern some sort of cosmic commutation between child and parent or a younger and an older person such that each comes to understand something about the other’s experiences and challenges. The progenitor is likely the original Freaky Friday, from 1976, and many more followed in its wake.
I speak as someone who endured many schlocky examples of the genre as a kid during a strangely prolific cycle of body-swap films. There was a 17-month period between October of 1987 and March of 1989 where no fewer than five such films found their way to American cinemas. Those films:
The Dudley Moore-Kirk Cameron vehicle Like Father, Like Son (October, 1987)
Vice Versa (March ‘88), starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage
18 Again! (April ‘88), which marked George Burns’ final screen performance
Big (June ‘88), the beloved Tom Hanks film that, while not featuring a parent/kid role reversal, covers similar ground
And finally, in March of ‘89, Dream a Little Dream, which brought together Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Jason Robards, and Piper Laurie into one absurdly convoluted, four-way body swap
I don’t mean to suggest that My Old Ass is a subspecies of the body-swap genre, but I do think it accomplishes something those films strive for but rarely attain (Big notwithstanding). Freaky Friday and the like posit an enormous gulf between kids and adults, and it takes a metaphysical trading of places to make the parties sympathize with one another. Thereafter, the two get along more harmoniously because they’ve walked in the other’s shoes, so to speak.
But in the film in question, the two Elliotts are one in the same, and what separates the 18-year-old one from the 39-year-old one is by no means unbridgeable: the former will arrive at the latter in due time. My Old Ass asks: what do I know now that I didn’t know then? What makes this film special is that it speaks to the universal human impulse to avoid pain and to minimize suffering. What could be more poignant than someone seeking to save an adolescent from trauma and heartbreak, especially when that adolescent is her younger, as yet unscarred self?
Maybe I found My Old Ass so unexpectedly compelling because I have a daughter just a couple of years shy of the film’s teenaged protagonist, and I recognize the elder Elliott’s desire to shield a young person from hurt, however possible. Or perhaps it’s that I saw the film the day after the news broke that Plaza’s husband Jeff Baena had died by his own hand, and I mapped that real-life tragedy onto the events of the film? Or maybe my ass, 45 years old as of today, is simply a sucker for coming-of-age movies, especially one as graceful as this?
Indeed, My Old Ass made it to my best-of list of 2024. It was such a pleasant surprise with two genuinely sweet performances about time and feelings. It speaks a universal truth about growing up and lands so many crucial bits of advice that we all like to give our younger selves.
Great write-up, Justin -- and Happy B-day again ;)
Loved reading this! This film was one I didn't make it around to last year, and the more I hear about it, the more I know it's worth my time. Dazed and Confused is my all-time fave coming of age movie; not just because there's hardly any plot to it, but because almost everyone in it is sufficiently awkward and overly-performative, which feels exactly like my own teenage years. 😆 Happy belated birthday!