Mavis Gary, author of a once-popular series of young adult novels, is 37 years old. What that probably means, even though Jason Reitman’s new film doesn’t address it explicitly, is that she’s just a year shy of her 20th high school reunion. With that in mind, many of the events of Young Adult feel like a last ditch attempt to prepare for going back home and facing friends with impending middle age suddenly feeling uncomfortably and uncontrollably close. The years that seemed like eons to accomplish her ambitions vanished, and, in the grips of alcoholism, arrested development, and cold-sweat panic, Mavis (Charlize Theron) decides the best course of action is to retreat from the big city for a little while and head back to the her small town roots. Oh, and while she’s there, to steal her high school sweetheart away from his wife and infant daughter. If she could pull it off, she’d sure make a splash at that hypothetical reunion next year.
Reitman once again directs a script from Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, but there is nothing quirky or twee about Young Adult. While her disastrous follow-up to that film, Jennifer’s Body, was billed as a dark comedy, it was mostly just a goofy B-horror misfire. Cody was smart enough to learn from that mistake: This is how you do dark comedy, with an emphasis on the dark. The result is at once off-putting and the best work that either of these two has yet accomplished.
Mavis opens the movie asleep in bed one morning, in a position that will become familiar throughout the film. Night after night of drinking, she falls into bed, usually fully clothed, and wakes up to groggily feed her dog and perk up with some Diet Coke chugged out of a 2-liter bottle. She’s hopelessly blocked on her new book, meant to be the last in a long-running series of Sweet Valley High-style books that have fallen out of favor. A birth announcement from that old flame’s wife drops her one rung closer to rock bottom and sends her back home to carry out her ill-advised scheme.
Sure, there are plenty of laughs here, especially once Patton Oswalt appears as Matt, the nerdy guy who used to have the locker next to Mavis back in high school. He plays Jiminy Cricket to Mavis’ homewrecking Pinocchio, though he’s about as powerless as a cricket to stop her. But despite his plentiful wisecracks, the tone of the film is dire. In one scene, Mavis has a meal with her parents, and reveals to them the she has a serious drinking problem; they simply laugh it off as her being jokingly melodramatic. The subtle look of disappointment and sad acceptance on her face is heartbreaking, as the first nakedly truthful moment she’s probably had in years is quickly dismissed.
Matt’s got a personal tragedy of his own, as near the end of his high school career he was brutally beaten by a group of jocks who thought he was gay. The beating has left him walking with a cane the rest of his life, and with a sexual dysfunction that he makes uncomfortable offhand jokes about. To not laugh at his own misfortune—making self-deprecating jokes about his penis and his lonely nights spent creating custom action figure mashups that are the height of geekery—would mean facing how profoundly unhappy he is, too.
Needless to say, they make ideal drinking buddies, particularly once Mavis finds out he distills his own bourbon in the garage. These two are twin black holes, unavoidably drawn to one another’s emptiness. Theron and Oswalt make for one of the best onscreen pairings of the year, a lived in chemistry in their acidic, casually abusive interactions. This pair can’t stand each other on the one hand, but have no one else that can understand on the other.
Reitman offers no escape from Mavis’ despair, no cinematic distance. There’s little incidental music in anything but the transitions to remind us that this is a movie; scenes either play out in anxious, unaccompanied quiet, or with whatever songs the characters happen to be listening to. The latter device is used to great effect in highlighting both her obsession with the object of her affection, as well as the fact that he’s moved on.
Even more importantly, Young Adult doesn’t take an easy road to redemption, if it even reaches that point at all. Mavis hits bottom, she has her moment of clarity, but how much of an impact these events leave is left open to interpretation. Reitman and Cody’s closing only parodies closure. The characters in young adult novels may get the neatly wrapped endings their stories require; the writer of those stories, stuck in a world where lives can’t be edited and rewritten, has no such luxuries.
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Young Adult
Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Diablo Cody
Starring Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson
Running time: 94 minutes
Rated R for language and some sexual content.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
