I read a review of this movie which said the only regrettable thing about it was the terrible name.  It said not to be put off by the slangy teenage dialogue because beyond that was an excellent coming-of-age fable full of wholesome wisdom about love and life and youth and families and all that good stuff.  Other reviews were good, so I went. 

Elliott is 18 years old and lives with an older and a younger brother on her parents’ cranberry farm in a picturesque corner of Canada replete with a lovely lake surrounded by tall timber.  She seems to have an idyllic life but she can’t wait to leave home and go off to college where she imagines her life will begin.  Meanwhile she’s enjoying the last of the summer hanging out with her girlfriends and having sex with her Girlfriend.  (This is a very modern family.   No one bats an eyelid.)  The Girlfriend doesn’t seem to be included in the fun outdoorsy teenage stuff with Elliott and the small g girlfriends.  Maybe she’s just for sex?  Hmm.  Whatever.  I don’t presume to understand how it all works these days.

One day Elliott collects the small g girlfriends and they go off in her outboard-powered dinghy to an island in the lake where they set up camp and proceed to drink tea made from ‘shrooms – what we used to call magic mushrooms.  They all start tripping in their own way.  One becomes entranced by the music and dances obliviously, another falls into a dreamlike sleep. 

Elliott is just starting to bemoan the apparent lack of effect of the ‘shrooms on her when suddenly up pops an older woman who turns out to be the incarnation of her 39-year-old self.  Elliott begs for information about her future.  Her older self refuses on the grounds that she wouldn’t want to change the course of history, but in the face of Elliott’s fervent pleading she offers a few pieces of advice:  be nicer to your family and if you meet someone called Chad, avoid him.  But she doesn’t say why.

Chad?  She doesn’t know anyone by that name, but her older self offers to keep in touch and they exchange phone numbers.  Elliott puts her in the phone as ‘My Old Ass’.  Hence the movie’s title. 

Morning comes, the girls wake up and go home.  Elliott had forgotten the little birthday party the family had ready for her the night before, complete with a lovely cake made by her sweetie of a Mom.  Mindful of her older self’s advice, she apologises to her Mom, is kinder to her loveable dad and starts being nice to her brothers.

Then she meets Chad. 

He’s a young fella about her age, he’s cute and kind and funny and it turns out he’s going to be around all summer, helping out her hard-working Dad on the farm.  She’s wary at first and tries to call her Old Ass for further guidance.  But older Elliott isn’t always available – things are busy in the afterlife – and Chad just keeps getting more and more charming.  She even starts wondering if she might be bi instead of gay. 

No more plot for you, dear reader.  The story unfolds at a good pace, with plenty of warmth and humanity and wisdom as promised. 

However.  I had two problems with it.  One, I was more annoyed by the teenage slang than I had expected.  The word ‘like’ infests the dialogue like a virus.  Is the lexicon of the young really so impoverished these days that this single word now performs as an adjective, a preposition, a conjunction and a verb….as well as a mindless filler?  Likewise the word ‘dude’, which appears to be a universal form of address here. 

Maybe I’m just getting old.  Maybe I’m forgetting how much ‘um’ and ‘y’know’ marked the speech of my youthful contemporaries and annoyed the oldies.  And maybe ‘dude’ is just the millennial version of our ‘mate’.  Although ‘mate’ was never as ubiquitous as ‘dude’ is here.   We had rules about who you could call ‘mate’!  Harrumph. 

The other problem?  My low tolerance for over-sentimentality.  A lot of the wholesome wisdom here comes in the language of the greeting-card mawkishness that passes for philosophy these days.  Harrumph again. 

I can’t fault the moral of this story but I prefer Tennyson’s version: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’