Review

Review Date: 18-December-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Young Adult (2011)

The first act of Young Adult looks like a biting revenge fantasy. It shows that beautiful, bitchy, popular girl from high school having sunk into a dingy, lonely existence as she approaches her forties. Mavis (Charlize Theron) lives with a neglected Pomeranian in a stark Minneapolis high rise. She is a slob who gets drunk a lot, sleeps with men she doesn't know or like, and suffers from writer's block while trying to produce another fluff book in a series about prep schoolers. Everything bores or disgusts her, particularly the happiness of other people whom she wants to look down on. Consequently, she is thrown for a loop by the news that her old beau Buddy (Patrick Wilson) has become a father. After stewing over this for a couple of days, she hops in her Mini and heads back to her hometown to set things right.

What happens next is not the blonde-behaving-badly comedy that the promos for Young Adult implied. Nor does it allow the audience to get too comfy with the idea of the prom queen getting her comeuppance. Screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, the pair that made Juno, invite pity for the dislikable Mavis because of her pain. The way they do this, combined with Theron's strong performance, results in a movie that is sharp and sensitive if not exactly pleasant to watch. The developmental psychology of the prom queen is revealed as Mavis invades Midwest Everytown and attempts to woo Buddy away from wife and child. Stuck in a young adult mentality, she believes that sex and partying (and nostalgia about the days of sex and partying) must trump a sedate home life. When she visits her parents after unsuccessfully trying to avoid them, she finds that her bedroom is unchanged after 20 years and her admission of alcoholism is brushed aside. Her parents prefer the image of the perfect daughter to the reality of the troubled one, and it's clear that Mavis follows suit. One is left to wonder if this sort of pressure is what makes bitchy girls bitchy in the first place. The pathos of her situation is not lost on her new drinking buddy Matt (Patton Oswalt), an embittered nerd whom Mavis ignored in high school and now turns to for support. After she has a meltdown, Matt gives it to her straight: even in her heyday she was not a good person. The only path out of her sorry state lies ahead of her rather than behind her.

Matt's sage advice notwithstanding, the story does not conclude with the assurance that Mavis will get her act together. She has a long row to hoe. Young Adult is like the grim fate you envisioned for a popular kid when signing a yearbook but were sorry to hear about at a reunion.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.