Young Adult (2011)

Mavis Gary is nothing if not a creature of habit. She wakes up every morning with the television on (likely something with the Kardashians), she takes a drink and then shoves back about a liter of Diet Coke and goes on with her day. In most cases, her day barely involves leaving her Minneapolis apartment. She’s an author of a young adult book series called Waverly Prep, though she doesn’t get credit on the cover. The series has just been cancelled, and now she is struggling to get through the final installment. In many ways, she’s the perfect author for a series about teenagers; her mind has never left the horrible, clique-centric world of high school. As soon as Mavis was thrust into adulthood, she hit wall after wall. In her hometown of Mercury, she was the queen of the world. Now she’s a divorced alcoholic who is as lonely as can be, and Jason Reitman’s Young Adult follows Mavis and her attempted return to the romanticized life she always had planned. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go all that well.

Mavis is portrayed brilliantly by Charlize Theron, who makes the wise decision of never going overboard with her performance. At the beginning of the film, she decides to head back to Mercury in order to win back her old high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson). There’s just one teensy-tiny little problem with his: he’s a happily married man with a newborn daughter. This does not deter Mavis. She sees suburban family life as a sort of purgatory, and she views herself as Buddy’s liberator who will finally take him to the hustle-bustle that is Minneapolis. When the two of them dated in high school, they had dreams of living a long life together. As is the case with most high school relationships, it did not pan out. He has moved on to a new wife (Elizabeth Reaser) and a whole new existence, yet Mavis refuses to let go of those days. Her driving music consists mostly of an old cassette tape that includes Teenage Fanclub and 4 Non Blondes.

All this madness is observed by Matt Freehauf (the sneaky-great Patton Oswalt), an old high school geek who was handicapped in his senior year and continues to live in Mercury all these years later. At times, he mostly acts as an audience surrogate; calling out Mavis’ insanity yet still utterly mystified with her. Even though her failures are obvious, he still admires her because, heck, she was the popular girl in high school. He’s no Georgia peach himself—he’s obviously damaged goods and he hasn’t bothered to do a lot with his life—but Oswalt at least allows us a way in to all this chaos. Young Adult plays much like the old cliché of a train wreck occurring in slow motion. We all know Mavis is walking into a disaster, and it’s just a matter of waiting for it to come.

Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody (their second collaboration) seem just as fascinated by Mavis as we are; the direction isn’t as stylistic as we’ve come to expect from his past efforts Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air. It isn’t lazy, but just like Theron’s performance it serves the material well. Young Adult is all about watching Mavis in her natural habitat, and we sit captivated by every last excruciating detail. While she views Buddy’s life as a prison, watching her go through the motions in her apartment and eventually in her hotel room feels much more like imprisonment than anything the object of her affections is going through. When you contrast their lives, it’s obvious which one is in need of a drastic change.

The real soul-sucking power of Mavis is that whenever she walks into a room she sends everyone around her right back to the world of Mercury High School. Everyone else is just as obsessed with the ’90s as Mavis is, and the general interactions between all of the characters wouldn’t feel out of place if everyone were twenty years younger. This extends to when Mavis is forced to sit through a meal with her parents; the whole way through she does nothing more than pout, whine, and come just a few seconds away from storming off to what was once her bedroom and slamming the door. She believes she’s the only one with a clear head on her shoulders, despite the fact that her brain has yet to age past 17. This is never more clearly illustrated than when she receives an early phone call from Buddy, and reacts like a girl at a lunch table hearing that a boy thinks she’s cute. Yet the moment isn’t as cartoonish as it is troublingly realistic. No one in Young Adult is completely past their high school days; Mavis just embodies all of their worst traits in one blond, pretty package.

My one real quibble with the film comes late, when a character is introduced that seems to serve little purpose besides rushing along the film’s denouement. For all the chaos that Mavis and the rest of the characters just went through, it seems awful convenient that one stranger would come in and wrap things up with such expediency. Other than these few details, Young Adult is a staggering portrait of an obviously disturbed person who must regress in order to feel important. It’s a more superficially modest film that Reitman’s previous efforts, but it may be his most successful attempt at taking otherwise excruciating drama and balancing it out with genuinely hilarious humor. Reitman’s films all come from a recognizably human place, and Young Adult is no different. It places us right in the middle of Everytown, America, and shows us—for better or for worse—the various types of people that modern society is breeding. That it feels so authentic is the scariest part of all.

Grade: A-