Young Adult

Review:

Gorgeous but damaged, conceited yet self-loathing, Charlize Theron dares you to like her in Young Adult, and the movie itself dares you to stick with an anti-heroine who makes no apologies for her deplorable behaviour.

It is an exciting thing to see, this willful rejection of tidy character arcs and happy endings, and it actually makes you wish Young Adult had been even further fleshed out and gone on a little longer. This is not something we say about a movie very often.

In reteaming with Juno director
Jason Reitman, screenwriter Diablo Cody dials down the snark that
marked the Oscar-winning script that made her a superstar in her own
right. She actually has created the anti-Juno in a lot of ways while
managing to retain much of the directness, the sharply drawn characters
and the casual poignancy that are her signatures.

Theron’s Mavis
Gary is as verbal as Juno MacGuff was, but rather than finding the
perfect, clever quip at all times, she usually manages to say the
rudest, most inappropriate thing. Rather than being mature and wise
beyond her years, she is in a state of arrested development, emotionally
stuck where she peaked: high school. Where she was the prom queen,
naturally. Theron continues to show her versatility, hurling herself
headlong into this unhinged character. There are shadings of Nicole
Kidman in “To Die For” here; she will make you squirm, but she may make
you feel a little sorry for her, too.

Externally, Mavis has not
changed a bit since her glory days; she still is the statuesque blonde
everyone worshipped and feared. But inside, she is a disaster. Divorced,
she lives in a messy Minneapolis high-rise apartment with her neglected
Pomeranian and writes a series of teen lit books called Waverley Prep,
clearly modelled after the revered Sweet Valley High, which Cody herself
has been working on turning into a film. The gig is about to end and
Mavis is having trouble writing the final installment, especially since
she wakes up hung over every morning.

One day, she finds
unexpected inspiration in a forwarded email. Seems her high-school
sweetheart, football player Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and his wife,
fellow classmate Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), have announced the arrival of
their baby girl. Mavis becomes obsessed with the notion that she and
Buddy are meant to be together after all these years and returns home to
pry him away from his family.

In the vein of Alexander Payne,
Reitman finds just the right affectionately mocking tone in taking some
jabs at small-town Midwestern life. Mercury, Minnesota, is full of
awfully decent folk who seem content with their quiet lives, their
fast-food chains, their mediocre sports bar. The bland Buddy is one of
them, but nostalgia is a powerful thing, so Mavis still views him as a
golden god, and as the key to her happiness. Wilson plays on his “prom
king” persona from Little Children, but with a twist: he is a little
scruffy, a little paunchy, something we can see clearly but Mavis cannot
through her haze of delusion and bourbon.

The other figure from
high school who has an impact on her during her visit is the nerdy,
tubby Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), who dwelled on the opposite end of
the social spectrum and, like Mavis, remains trapped there physically
and emotionally. Matt suffered serious injuries back then when the jocks
tried to gay-bash him (he actually is straight); 20 years later, when
Mavis runs into him at a bar, she still refers to him as “the hate-crime
guy”. But he ends up calling her on her cruelty, her insanity, and the
two form an unlikely bond in just a brief time.

Oswalt may be
best known for his standup comedy and his voice work in Ratatouille, but
he is excellent here in a more dramatic role, as he was in the
little-seen indie Big Fan. He is the heart of the film, the anchor, the
voice of reason, but there is nothing smug or self-righteous about him.
Matt is as stunted as Mavis is, which Oswalt conveys in subtle,
heartbreaking ways that always ring true.

You come to care about
his character so much, you’d like to see more of a resolution for him
than Young Adult provides; perhaps not a happy ending, which is fine,
but at least another chapter.