Film review: Young Adult (15)

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Thursday 2 February 2012 00:00

By refusing to conform to Hollywood’s romantic ideals, Young Adult, with Charlize Theron in note-perfect form, emerges as a serious piece of work

DESPITE being one of the few young screenwriters in Hollywood who has their own distinctive voice, Diablo Cody comes in for a lot of criticism for daring to create dialogue for her characters that has its own special rhythm and poetry. The charge bandied around a lot when Juno came out is that her dialogue is too affected and unbelievable – a ludicrous complaint given that it fits perfectly within the context of the worlds she creates for her characters.

The good news is that Cody clearly hasn’t taken such sniping to heart. With Young Adult she’s crafted a fabulously black-hearted comedy, one that reinforces how brilliant she is at constructing stories that subvert expectations and conventions at every turn. That’s something that wasn’t fully appreciated with her last effort, the Karyn Kusama-directed horror film Jennifer’s Body, but with Young Adult, she’s reteamed with her with Juno director Jason Reitman and he once again proves a fearless collaborator.

That’s important, because Young Adult’s protagonist, Mavis Gary, is the sort of disreputable, unlikeable soul who could be seriously off-putting if mishandled (or seriously inconsequential if softened). Instead, as played by a note-perfect Charlize Theron, she’s bitingly funny, tragic and, in her own twisted and deluded way, oddly inspiring – making her by far the most fascinating and complicated lead character in any movie out there right now.

That’s due in part to the absolute mastery of tone exhibited in the film. When we first meet Mavis, it’s clear that she’s a train-wreck-in-waiting, but rather than setting out to demonize or caricature her for easy laughs, the film methodically, and with great economy, lays the groundwork for a much more humane and pointed character study.

In her late 30s, Mavis has scored a modicum of success as an author by ghostwriting a series of teenage vampire books (in amusing nod to critiques of Cody’s work, we see Mavis constantly watching trashy reality TV and hanging around kids in malls jotting down elaborate teen speak to use in her prose). She also lives in a nice – if somewhat slovenly – high-rise city apartment.

Such things are enough to make her think that she’s achieved something with her life and if those achievements aren’t exactly meaningful, they at least put her ahead of the former classmates who never made it out of her nearby hometown of Mercury, Minnesota. As it happens, her mind is much on those old classmates thanks to an e-mail she’s received from her high school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson).

He and his wife have just had their first child and, perhaps stung by her own recent divorce, or perhaps trying to escape the reality of having to confront an editor who keeps hounding her for a draft of what is set to be her final book, Mavis makes an appalling resolution to return home to win back her ex and rescue him from the perceived banality of small-town suburban life.

At first the film presents all of this through Mavis’s delusional eyes and throughout we’re party to a little meta-commentary on the action courtesy of the scraps of teen fiction Mavis begins composing as she reconnects with her past life.

Gradually, though, the scope of the film is widened. After she rolls back into town and arranges to meet Buddy for early evening drinks (as he casually reminds her, fatherhood makes staying out late problematic), she finds herself in a bar getting drunk with a Matt (Patton Oswalt), a guy she blithely ignored in high school and only really remembers upon realizing – with staggering insensitivity – that he was the victim of a horrifying hate crime in school that has left him crippled.

As she confesses why she’s really back in town, he tells her what a spectacularly bad idea her plan to win back Buddy is and, as the film cuts between their two perspectives, he gradually becomes the voice of reason in the film. Or so we think. What’s fascinating here is just how subtly the film cuts between these two points of view: we barely notice how close they’re becoming to one another as she proceeds with her ill-conceived plan, which the film incrementally unravels with knuckle-gnawing precision.

In any regular film, for instance, this would be the cue for a redemptive story exposing how bogus the Hollywoodized romantic ideal of following your true heart’s desire really is by conforming to that other Hollywoodized romantic ideal: the one in which a prodigal child returns and is humbled by the decency she sees all around her.

Young Adult, though, is not a normal film and its narrative twists are breathtaking, not only for how audacious they are, but also because they manage – with the aid of brilliant performances all round – to extend sympathy to a character that by the judgmental standards of most mainstream and arthouse movies is irredeemable. She’s a piece of work – and, in a culture full of safe and dreary awards-bait, so is this film.

RATING: ****

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