Young Adult

Dir. Jason Reitman

I think as humans it’s one of our goals in life to avoid responsibility. Something about waking up and thinking about the bills that need to be paid, that rattling noise coming from the car or that call to the doctor you keep putting off that just seems so…lame. Growing up, I had romantic notions of being an adult. I could buy all the video games and Dunkaroos my little heart desired! You come to find, however, that there is precious little time to play video games and Dunkaroos have so many carbs. I think that’s why Charlize Theron’s character Mavis Gary in Young Adult struck such a chord with me. She is a woman hell-bent on recapturing her glory days of adolescence and she will do just about anything to get it.

As we’re introduced to Mavis, she’s passed out in her bed. She carries around a tiny Pomeranian named Dolce in a pink bag. She writes, or rather ghostwrites, young adult novels about the lives of prep school students and gains inspiration from eavesdropping on real students. Frankly, Mavis’s life is a mess. She did, however, escape the clutches of her small town upbringing and tells herself each and every day how fortunate she is to go on to bigger and better things. One day, though, an email announcement about a former flame’s baby triggers something inside of her and she races back to her hometown to win back the heart of her high school sweetheart Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson).

Young Adult is basically an extended character study on the broken, sad, and bitter Mavis Gary. As played by Charlize Theron, Mavis is utterly engrossing and often times you wince at the things she does and says. In her mind, she’s a hot, irresistible seductress yet on the outside she may be hot, but she is really just pitiful – and frankly the woman is batshit crazy. There was a certain suspension of belief with Mavis; she certainly didn’t exist in the real world as we know it, but in her own crazy fantasy world. Luckily for the audience we have Matt Frehauf (Patton Oswald), a high school classmate of Mavis’s, that not only deflects her shallow insanity back at her, but provides us with a nice dose of cold reality. In high school, while Mavis was prancing around as one of the most popular kids in school, oblivious to the world, Matt was accused of being a homosexual and savagely beaten by those who ran in the same circle as Mavis. As a testament to Mavis’s ignorance, she simply recalls him as “Hate Crime Guy”. The two make for a strange pairing yet ultimately bond over their love of liquor and the fact that they are both outcasts for very different reasons.

The picture painted in Young Adult is dreary. I think we’re programmed to think that the popular jocks and cheerleaders in high school that make our lives miserable will end up being failures at life – but when you actually see what that looks like it kind of breaks your heart. As I watched the movie, I was reminded of a similar themed movie that came out this summer starring Cameron Diaz. In it, Diaz played almost the same character but instead aimed for low-brow guffaws and that film ended up a mean-spirited, hollow mess. Young Adult avoids this trapping by making Mavis a very complicated, three-dimensional character. It doesn't hurt that the acting is several grades higher too.

There are moments during Young Adult where I laughed out loud. There are moments where my mouth was agape in utter shock. There are also moments of strange tenderness as well. There was a moment towards the end of the movie where Mavis teeters on an epiphany. She may have been caught up in a moment, but she really began to think about her life. She receives some words of advice from another character that tips her scale in one direction – at this moment you see just how fragile and broken Mavis truly is and you pray that she’ll change but she probably won’t. Well, I guess that’s growing up.

Grade: B