Suppose you could meet and talk with your teenage self - the self that is finishing high school, leaving home and starting a new life. Suppose you want to give your younger self advice that might improve your (joint) lives. You can't tell your young self to invest all your money with Warren Buffett because that might change your life too much, and your adult life is o.k. so you don't want to take a chance on messing it up with some big intervention. But maybe you could give your younger self some advice regarding a relationship. Perhaps that would make your joint lives better... but perhaps not.
I thought My Old Ass was a real gem. The premise of meeting your younger self has been done in books and movies before, but I did enjoy this take on it. The mechanism of the meeting isn't sci-fi but rather just your basic magical realism; the meeting and conversations happen and you don't need to know or understand why - you just accept it. In terms of genre I would agree with the publicity calling it a coming-of-age movie, but it blends in a touch of rom-com - a category I turn to in times of stress.
The acting is spot on. This is the first movie role ever for the lead actress, Maisy Stella; she won multiple awards for her performance. The older self, the parents, the siblings, the boyfriend are all equally well executed. But my real award goes to the scriptwriters for crafting a series of dialogues that sound true to real life.
An additional plus is that the movie was filmed in the lake district of Ontario north of Toronto, where the landscape features look ever so much like northern Minnesota. Excellent.
Addendum: Note to my future self. The storyline skillfully addresses my favorite quotation from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (which I can't cite here because it might serve as a spoiler for those who haven't yet seen the movie).
I fantasize about this scenario. It reminds me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry."
ReplyDeleteRealistically, my 16-year old self would not be able to comprehend much what I would tell him. But I could probably give him some practical advice that would help him make a few better choices for the next few years.
I would worry that anything I said - anything that might change even a moment of my younger self's life - might ripple through space time and wink the older me out of existence. Like that TV show where the guy was transported back to the Jurassic era, accidentally stepped on a butterfly, and returned to find the U.S. in the grip of a totalitarian regimen. (which makes you wonder if some future person has recently done exactly that...)
DeleteLoved hat movie and I even went so far as to imagine a slightly different version where you realize it was all about the older character and what she needed to process.
ReplyDeleteWe watched this last night. Enjoyed it, thanks for the recommendation.
ReplyDelete