Young Adult: It Could Have Been Great

Great writers have a contentious relationship with their hometowns. For reference, see Faulkner, Hemingway, or Colin Hanks' character in Orange County. But so do slightly-above-mediocre writers, like yours truly and Mavis Gary, the main character in Young Adult.

Mavis (Charlize Theron) is the Mean Girl who never grew up. Stuck in a state of arrested development, she moved to the big city (Minneapolis) and became a ghostwriter for a YA book series, through which she relives her memories of success, popularity, and love. In reality, she's a wasteland of a human being, subsisting on a diet of E! reality television, ice cream, booze, and Wii Fit. When her high school sweetheart emails a photo of his new baby, Mavis sees this as a cry for help. Clearly, he must be miserable, trapped in the prison of their hometown and suffocating in his marriage. So she travels home to free him.

Back in Mercury, Minnesota, she rolls her eyes at the combination KFC/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell across the street from a Chili's, and maintains a consistent BAC high enough to survive this suburban hell. At the local dive bar, she encounters Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), the nerdy kid whose locker was next to Mavis' all through high school, but who she only remembers as the victim of the hate-crime that has left his leg and genitals mangled. Drunkenly, she attempts to solicit his help in winning back the man who still must love her, while Matt struggles to remind her that he is married, and happy, and that she's trying to destroy his life.

Eventually, the two former lovers meet for drinks, and Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) invites Mavis back into his life, as a friend. But she is incapable of imagining a world where they aren't married and making their own child, and her campaign of emotional manipulation and terror begins; claiming victims in its wake.

I've rarely been so tongue-tied on evaluating a film. The acting is, more or less, stellar. Patrick Wilson is always great at everything he does, which I don't just say because he's the most beautiful man on the face of the planet; Patton Oswalt steals the movie with every frame he occupies and provides the most complicated and memorable character in the production; Charlize Theron delivers a Bret Easton Ellis wet-dream of human emptiness and depravity. But the film itself doesn't match up to the high standard its stars set.

I try to offer my criticism within something of a vacuum; abandoning expectations based on names, previous work, or buzz. But perhaps my fandom got ahead of me here. Jason Reitman is my favorite director working today. Between Thank You For Smoking and Up In The Air, I was convinced the man could do no wrong. I still think Juno (his previous collaboration with writer Diablo Cody) is a brilliant film despite its many smaller flaws and critical pushback. But I think the blame for Young Adult rests squarely at his feet. Cody's script is, surprisingly minimalist, and free of the clunky hispterism that plagued Juno and wrecked Jennifer's Body. It's grown up and brutal, and closer to Shame than say, the similarly themed Just Friends from 2005. But something gets lost in transition.

I laughed out loud, alone, at a number of scenes and moments that were probably much more successful on the page than they came across on screen. It just doesn't feel like a Reitman film. He's known for clever visual choices that intelligently compliment the emotional arcs… wait, not even that: He's known for films that have more layers than you know what to do with. Which is what makes something like Thank You For Smoking so re-watchable that it's equally fresh on its 50th viewing as its first. You probably won't feel the need to watch Young Adult twice. And I could have told you that by the time we were finished with the title sequence, which is equal parts annoying and "I see what you're going for."

Maybe it's something much simpler than visual choices or complexity. The film just lacks a question. Thank You attacks every ideology held by anyone; it literally plays devil's advocate. Up In The Air is a new generation's Fight Club, and even Juno approaches subject matter with strong diametrically opposed stances by choosing a route of greatest resistance. But what if Young Adult is supposed to challenge us? To hate/pity those who remained in your hometown? To hate/pity those who escaped and think so highly of themselves by becoming high functioning alcoholics with therapists and tiny dogs? To live in the past or to cast it aside? To embrace adulthood or celebrate Peter Panning?

The film culminates in a scene where a smaller character from the hometown and Mavis speak openly and honestly about who they are and what they want. Mavis is broken but cannot fathom how everyone from Mercury grew up to find happiness. Matt's sister (Collette Woolf) explains that no one here is happy, but instead fat, stupid, and dreaming about what kind of glamorous fantasy life Mavis must have in the big city of Minneapolis. You can't tell to what degree the sister is placating or to what degree Cody is writing the fantasy conversation that every kid who moved away has ever wanted to hear, although that makes it condescending to both sides. In my theater, I heard Boos. In LA. That's an odd response, to say the least.

It goes around and around, but comes back towards a central thesis of "the grass is always greener on the other side", a complicated argument to leave us with. No one is happy in the city or back at home, no one is happy as an adult or a child. But by extension, no one is happy with the movie Young Adult. As mentioned, Shame is a similar film where the character winds up returning to their destructive lifestyle despite the journey, and where no judgment was offered other than a title. Kudos to both for not telling us how to feel or giving simple, digestible answers, but how am I left feeling that Shame took the stronger stance?

Young Adult feels rushed, from a production sense. It contains great scenes and flashes of brilliant acting (especially Oswalt and Theron), but comes off unfinished as a film. Truthfully, I wouldn't be so let down if it were anyone other than Reitman, but I know what he's capable of, and given this raw material and talent, it should have been an Oscar contender, not a B-.