YOUNG ADULT directed by Jason Reitman (USA, 2011)
From the writer-director team that brought us Juno, Young Adult is an intelligent comedy of sexual manners; a lively and humorous movie with a darker subtext.
Mavis (Charlize Theron) is excellent as a fading femme fatale described ,in less charitable terms by one resident of her home town, as a “psychotic prom queen bitch”. By all appearances she lives a glamorous life as a single woman in a smart apartment in Minneapolis where she works as a ghost writer of a teen fiction series aimed at young adults. She’s blonde, sexy and slim despite appearing to exist on a diet of liquor and fast food.
But she’s also a divorced semi alcoholic who is addicted to daytime TV and unfulfilled by casual lovers. When she receives an e-mail from her ex, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) announcing the birth of a daughter she fixes on a doomed mission to rekindle the flame of this relationship . She is unfazed by the fact that her high school sweetheart is now a happily married father – “we can beat this thing together” she tells him.
Returning to her home town of Mercury, Minnesota means having to face a suburban hell where the locals are “so happy with so little” and which she sums up as “a hick lake town that smells of fish shit”.
In a seedy bar she meets a nerdy former classmate from high school, Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), who was a victim of a hate crime after being wrongly branded as gay. The violent attack left him crippled with a smashed leg , a bent penis and a cynical outsider’s view of the world. These two become unlikely buddies, his appeal to her being that he can read her like a book and also has a large supply of home made hooch.
Her old boyfriend Buddy doesn’t come across as the brightest spark or a prime catch which adds to the idea that Mavis is viewing her past through rose-tinted spectacles.
Like Juno, Rietman and screenwriter Diablo Cody resist following a more cynical path they could easily have pursued. For a movie pitching at a mainstream audience this is understandable but it also means that it barely scratches the surface of the issues the storyline raises.
The keynote song is Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept which Mavis finds on an old mix tape and plays to death. She reminds Buddy that this song was playing “the first time I went down on you”. But perhaps even more significant is the song by Diana Ross that plays out with the closing credits. When We Grow Up has the repeated line “we don’t have to change at all”.
This is a movie about coming to terms with ageing and the inevitable changes that go with it. “Everyone gets old – not everyone grows up” is the tag line although after the one week of madness you get the sense that Mavis will slip back into her old routine fairly quickly to confirm the accuracy of Matt’s observation : “You don’t know shit about being an adult”.
