Young Adult (2011) ***/*****
Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman’s previous collaboration, Juno, was so distinctive in voice and so widely praised that it was pretty much impossible to watch it and not have a strong opinion about it. There were those who it worked for, who found it to be clever, insightful, and refreshingly honest. And then there were those who didn’t care for it, who found the dialogue to be annoyingly crafted, the insights to be shallow, and the characters to be painted on a canvas of false quirk. I fell into the latter camp. Coming out of the theater after Juno, now aware of who Diablo Cody was, I was absolutely certain that she was a new voice I had zero interest in ever hearing again.
I consider myself, at least in my private moments, to be a professional, so I went into Young Adult with an open mind and a willingness to give Cody another chance. I’ve always liked Reitman as a director when he wasn’t paired with her words, so surely I could find something worth liking in this movie, right? I did. And I didn’t even find the script to be anywhere as off-putting as Juno’s. There were a few Cody fingerprints here and there that made my skin crawl: teenage girls talking like 80s era valley girls for no reason, a main character who is skin-crawlingly self centered; but there were also some bits of comedy that worked for me. Throughout the film the main character Mavis (Charlize Theron) is writing a series of young adult novels, and her lead character is a total Mary Sue. She’s the most beautiful, the most popular, and she finds herself feeling constantly tortured because of her virtues. I can’t prove it, but the whole thing played like a jab at Stephenie Meyer and her insufferable character of Bella Swan, and I found myself chuckling during all of the writing scenes. Really… me? Chuckling at Diablo Cody dialogue? Moments like this are why it’s important to at least convince yourself that you’re an impartial reviewer.
So we’ve been over the fact that the main character is a self-obsessed writer of young adult novels, but what else happens? Mavis is one of those people that peaked, not in high school, but soon after it. She was prom queen, she was the most beautiful, the quickest of wit, and that was enough to get her out of her small Minnesota town and into a high rise apartment in Minneapolis; but not enough to get her much further than that. When we meet her she is lonely, confused, and living the same life she did in her early twenties despite the fact that she’s approaching forty. An email from her high school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson) announcing the birth of his newborn baby is enough to push her over the edge, and before you know it she’s in her car, on her way back to her home town, and committed to ruining Buddy’s marriage and taking him back to the city with her, like they always planned. Wrinkles get introduced into her plan, however, when she discovers that Buddy is much more happily married than she imagined, and when she randomly finds herself striking up an unlikely friendship with Matt (Patton Oswalt), the nerd of her graduating class who was beaten into a permanent limp by a group of jocks who just assumed he was gay.
Like I suggested earlier, my biggest problem with this movie was with what an insufferable miscreant Mavis is. This is just a miserable, awful character. And I get what Cody is doing with her. I understand that we’re being introduced to a broken, difficult person who has very thick defensive walls up. And I get that I’m supposed to hate her at first, but as I watch her fail in her pursuits, have her protective walls get knocked down, and slowly show vulnerability, that I’m supposed to come to understand her, and maybe even relate to her a bit. The problem is that I just never got there. Mavis sucks; so much so that I was actively rooting against her. Spending time with her was difficult, and not fun, and just because the time spent with her was crafted to be difficult and not fun by the filmmakers didn’t make it any less unpleasant an experience.
A lot of the humor here lies in uncomfortable interactions. Similar to modern TV shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, we watch our protagonist behave badly, badger unsuspecting onlookers, and then we nervously laugh at what an uncomfortable experience watching it all is. The difference is, with characters like David Brent in The Office, or Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, you’re dealing with at least slightly lovable scamps whose behavior mirrors your darkest instincts in some way. With Mavis, I just didn’t like her; the way she behaved had little in common with even the deepest, darkest places in my psyche. Often I felt left hung out to dry because I had to spend so much time with her. There is a big confrontation scene towards the end of the film, at the naming ceremony for Buddy’s baby, that just made me angry. Here I was, going to this party with Mavis, watching her behave horribly, and then being forced to sit right beside her as she ruined an important day for a bunch of kindhearted people. I wanted to scream at the screen, “I’m not with her! I don’t even know this lady!” Why did I have to experience all of this awful stuff because of committed sins that I had no complicity in?
The other big problem with Mavis as the main character is that spending all of your time with her just gets boring. You’re stranded with her for the entirety of the film, and seeing as you’re not rooting for her to win, and you’re not engaged in her struggle for happiness, what it all adds up to is a lot of time spent watching somebody you don’t like making decisions you don’t agree with. Do I care if this bitch gets back together with her old boyfriend? No, as a matter of fact, I hope that she doesn’t. Wilson’s Buddy was a complete blank of a character, to the point where he kind of had a fifty yard stare going on, but he seemed like he had a good heart. I was hoping he would stay as far away from her as possible. Which could have been an intriguing character study in and of itself, watching a deeply damaged character self destruct and hit bottom, but the movie takes on too much of a cheeky, self aware tone for it to work on that level.
Where things did work for me was with the relationship that develops between her and Matt. Oswalt’s performance is heartbreaking, insightful, honest, and all the things that I thought Juno was trying to be but wasn’t. Every scene where he and Theron just hung out and got drunk together worked for me on a level that the rest of this movie didn’t. Their connection gave me something that I could hold on to. On the surface they seemed like characters that wouldn’t have very much in common, but in practice you see that they are sad in very similar ways. They’ve both been frozen in time, left paralyzed and incapable of progressing into adulthood. For Mavis she’s hung up on a youthful conceit of what success and glamour is, and for Matt it’s much more about staying tied to nerdy pursuits that most people grow out of; but they’re symptoms of the same disease. It doesn’t seem like connecting these two characters should have worked, but Cody makes it happen.
The problem is, the time they spend together didn’t make up nearly enough of the run time of the movie for me to consider it a complete success. The main reason I was liking their interactions is because I became completely invested in Oswalt’s character. He was tragic, he had desires, and I could really see myself getting behind his struggles if given the chance. Once Matt and Maven’s little dates were over I found myself wishing that I could have went home him with him instead of her. If you asked me six months ago if I would ever like a movie written by Diablo Cody, I would have told you probably not. But if you asked me now, I would say that if she ever wrote a movie from the perspective of one of her characters that was more openly lame and less falsely cool, then it is a definite possibility. But, until that happens, I’m likely to just suffer through her abrasive windows into the lives of awful people, perhaps unfairly attributing the faults of the characters to the faults of the author.
Before I start wrapping things up, I feel I should also make some mention of the other aspect of this film that I really enjoyed, and that was the location scouting. I’ve been of the opinion that Alexander Payne is the modern master of depressing realism, but this movie gives him a run for his money, and it’s mostly because of the scenery that surrounds the characters. When Mavis is in the city her life is anything but glamorous, and it’s largely because they found her the perfect tower apartment that someone who is only living in the city because of artifice would seek out. She’s not in a neighborhood, she’s not surrounded by any art or culture; she’s isolated downtown in a tower of despair. And once she travels back to the suburbs, dear lord, the scenery becomes almost too much to bare. Any house she’s in hasn’t been redecorated in decades, any time she’s outside she’s engulfed by the oppressive glow of chain business neon signs. And with the inclusion of Champion O’Malley’s, the sports bar and grill that supposedly lifted her hometown from a hick town to a burg on the rise, the movie nails its thesis in depression. “You’re gonna want to try the popcorn shrimp!” Oh God, there’s no class or character to the suburbs whatsoever.
Which brings us to the ending of the film, that gave us the resolution of the struggle Mavis is feeling between her idealistic but false life in the city and the soul crushing but honest life she lives when she goes back home. Being someone from a terrible small town that’s very close to a bustling metropolis myself, Mavis’ feelings of superiority that stemmed from her moving from small town to big city really hit home. Watching her wrestle with her feelings about her humble roots kept me interested all the way through. Would this be the typical film that tells us there is hidden wisdom and overlooked serenity in the life of small town folk? Or would Mavis reach a more interesting level of enlightenment, that would help me with my own struggles in dealing with coming from a less than enriching small town environment? The ending that the film gives us is up for debate. It might be sad, it might be psychotic, but it is most definitely condescending. Which pretty much mirrored my feelings about the rest of the film, so perhaps it’s appropriate. But that doesn’t mean I enjoyed what I watched. Young Adults made me laugh in places, and it had some performances I appreciated, but it generally wasn’t something I liked very much. Which is kind of how I felt about Mavis. She’s kind of funny to watch, but she’s too broken to ever grow or change, so what’s the point of getting invested in her? Eventually she’s going to marry some rich guy, ruin his life, and still end up killing herself when none of it brings her happiness. Fun times?
