Uncomfortably Hilarious Adult the Story of Us
Raw, naked, completely unvarnished of all pretense or false emotional melodramatic flourishes, Charlize Theron’s performance in Young Adult is a revelation. Sure the actress has won an Academy Award for her work in Monster. It’s great that she was nominated again just two years later for North Country. Truth be told, her acting there, while admittedly wonderful, came in features that never quite came together in a way that was wholly satisfying, a case that simply cannot, will not be levied against her latest, borderline greatest, motion picture.
Charlize Theron in Young Adult © Paramount Pictures
Reuniting the creative team behind Juno, director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody have sly crafted one of the more unsettlingly hilarious and disturbingly invigorating character studies in recent memory. A straight-forward chronicling of author – she’s the ghost writer for a series of young adult teen girl adventures – Mavis Gary (Theron) and what appears to be her nervous breakdown, the movie is instead a not-so-subtle and acidly pointed examination of our media obsessed ‘now’ culture and the concurrent increase in self-absorption its brought about. It is a story of the moment, one that fits the Kardashian and Real Housewives zeitgeist perfectly, and as such isn’t about to offer up solutions or easy answers and is instead only concerned about showcasing the cold, brutal truth.
For Mavis, not only is she dealing with the culmination of over a decade of work, her publisher has decided it’s time for her series to come to an end, she’s also still reeling from a recent divorce and the fact she spends the majority of her nights trolling around Minneapolis bars picking up random handsome men for a quick roll in the hay. But when she gets a baby announcement from ex-High School boyfriend Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) she’s sure she’s found the answers behind her malaise. She immediately sets off to her small town home in order to bust up his marriage to the perky Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) and become the woman she feels she was always meant to be if this particular man had stayed by her side.
Other films would have copped out at this point. The would have softened Mavis’ edges, would have had her come to some sort of world-changing epiphany that would give her new and fresh insight into the human condition and allowed her to become a better person á la A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life. Other filmmakers would have piled on the melodrama, stretched things out as far as they could go pouring on the emotional syrup as they did so. But not Young Adult, not Reitman and Cody, this particular tale refusing to pull its punches or make things easy for an audience eager to be spoon-fed mouthfuls of the typical Hollywood pabulum.
It starts with the introduction of Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), one of Mavis’ former High School classmates who was tragically left partially handicapped thanks to a brutal beating as a teenager. He’s the voice of reason, the person Mavis for some reason starts to confide in and marginally befriend even though he’s continually laughing at her and urging the thirty-something woman to disengage from her heartless quest. But Reitman and Cody never sympathize with him, never glosses over who he is now or asks the audience to pity Matt’s situation. They allow his fury, his indignation and, ultimately, his acceptance of whom he is to speak for itself, rounding things out in a way that ends up making the events of the final third all the more disquieting.
By doing this, the filmmakers paint Mavis into an even more revealing corner, allowing her image to become a mirrored reflection of modern consumerist society obsessed with reality television and with achieving celebrity for celebrity’s own sake. It strips the character to the marrow but at the same time does the same to everyone surrounding her, allowing the viewer to find fragments of themselves and their own current condition in each of the characters that spend any sort of time upon the screen.
Theron is fearless. In many ways, she is the shark from Jaws, the female equivalent to Michael Meyers, Jack Nicholson as he madly types the same line over and over and over in The Shining. She is a single-minded force of nature consumed with a single idea, a single purpose, so intent on seeing it through she doesn’t even begin to notice the damage it is doing to herself as well as the people around her.
Theron refuses to make Mavis likable, and that’s a good thing. You can understand where she is coming from, relate to her quite more than you probably want to, but liking her is a whole different ballgame altogether. Like every strong, proud and confident character there are aspects you can’t help but appreciate and admire, while spending time with her is hardly a chore. Yet she isn’t a woman you’d invite over for dinner, either, and watching the actress walk this fine line is something close to astonishing. Her performance captivates, it mesmerizes, it titillates the senses and excites corners of the mind some might not know even exist. A legendary portrait, her work in Monster may have won her an Oscar but it is what she does here that Theron will likely be remembered for generations to come.
What ultimately puts Young Adult over the top, however, is not the performances nor the witty dialogue but instead Reitman and Cody’s refusals to cut either their characters or their audience a break. Their film ends in a brilliantly caustic flourish that caught me by surprise, Mavis’ journey going to a place in a million years I never would have saw coming. The spotlight slowly changes direction to finally point in the most unlikely and uncomfortable spot of them all, the filmmakers stripping the audience to their birthday suits revealing that their story hasn’t been about Mavis at all and has instead been about us the entire time.
- Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
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