Coming up short

Young Adult doesn’t quite reach maturity

Buddy (Patrick Wilson) is the high school sweetheart Mavis Gary means to reclaim in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult.
Buddy (Patrick Wilson) is the high school sweetheart Mavis Gary means to reclaim in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult.

— It’s difficult to say exactly what is wrong with Young Adult, the second (after 2007’s Juno) collaboration between screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman.

On paper, the movie - a darkly comic sketch of a damaged 30-something who looks to regain her mojo by returning to her small hometown and snatching her high-school sweetheart away from his wife and newborn child- sounds highly promising. Casting Charlize Theron - a highly intelligent (and refreshingly subversive) actor - in the role of this wack-job is inspired. When you add Patton Oswalt to the mix as an unlikely truth-teller, the potential for awesomeness is such that it’s difficult to control one’s expectations. I don’t mind telling you I was looking forward to Young Adult - I expected (and wanted) it to be very good.

It isn’t. But it isn’t exactly bad either. It’s very smart and it has a couple of genuinely fine performances and some sharply ob-served comic moments, but in the end it’s just not enough. It’s not funny enough. It’s not tough enough. It’s not story enough.

I do think I get what the screenwriter, Cody, is going for - she’s an astute observer of her generation (she’s 33) - and in Mavis Gary (Theron) she’s stitched together an interesting kind of Frankenstein. Mavis is a (fairly recently) divorced contract writer of young adult fiction living in the big city of Minneapolis when the movie opens. She’s an arrested adolescent - enabled by her somewhat cushy (though hardly glamorous) job, which doesn’t require her to exercise any self-discipline.

She pads around in her Hello Kitty T-shirt, has no office to go to; neither her editor nor her audience require her to do more than crank out her quarterly quota of junk culture. It’s hack work and she knows it, though we’re given no sign that she aspires to higher art - instead Mavis narcotizes herself with reality TV, diet cola and joyless pickups.

Then, after receiving an e-mail from her high-school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson), announcing the birth of his first child, she impulsively decides to go home, to time travel back to the place where she was a master-of-the-universe prom queen dating the captain of the football team. (This resetting of her life is echoed by the soundtrack - during her journey home Mavis repeatedly replays the first track on a mix tape Buddy gave her, the Teenage Fan club song “The Concept.”)

But, of course, when she gets there, home doesn’t look like home anymore. Instead, it’s full of box stores and chain restaurants. And while Buddy is plainly glad to see her (or is he?), he also seems to like his circumscribed life and his sweet, dull wife (Elizabeth Reaser). He’s been domesticated. It’s really sad. Mavis really is his only hope.

There’s a story-within the-story about the matter of-fact “triumph of the spirit” of the crippled Matt (Patton Oswalt), whom the oblivious Mavis remembers from high school as “Hate Crime Boy.” (Matt was beaten and left for dead by bullies who mistook his social awkwardness for homosexuality.) Yet while he’s moved on from the scene of his devastating trauma, Mavis is still stuck in time, still superior, still untouchable. But adulthood has at least evened the field enough that she can share some of Matt’s craft brewed bourbon.

It’s to the credit of Theron and Oswalt that these scenes never degenerate into the declarative messages they could have - it’s obvious that Matt’s twisted body yet shining soul is meant to be contrasted with Mavis’ abiding hotness and diminished inner life. Together they overcome the scenes they are given to play together, but in the end, the play is fumbled - they blow it. Or the script does.

It may be that Young Adult is marred by a kind of contempt for the very people it seems to want to valorize - the good-hearted, decent and happy people of the fictional Mercury, Minn. We have no trouble understanding why Mavis thought herself well shed of them - they are all so nice and easily satisfied.

Wilson is an actor I’ve never quite figured out, which may mean he’s better than I’ve ever given him credit for being. Here, his Buddy seems to be a cipher, one of those ex-jocks unthinkingly rolling out the rest of his life. His Buddy here reminds me a bit of his character in Little Children, a kind of pocket Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike’s seminal American everyman, without the vicious appetites. (I’ll say this for Young Adult - it’s the rare movie I wish was longer; it felt like it was just getting started.)

Ultimately Theron nearly saves the movie with her uncompromising willingness to go all in on a loathsome character. But then she won an Oscar playing one monster - I wouldn’t be surprised (or object) if she won another for this one.

Young Adult

85 Cast: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Collette Wolfe, Jill Eikenberry Director: Jason Reitman Rating: R, for language and sexual content Running time: 94 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 36 on 12/16/2011

Upcoming Events