Review
US – Paramount Pictures (UK release 3 February 2012)
Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a divorced, city-dwelling, 37-year-old ghostwriter of the once popular Waverley Prep books for teens, which is now on the wane. Bored and blocked, Mavis can barely get started on the new (and as we learn later – last – book), when out of the blue she receives an email announcing the arrival of her ex Buddy Slade’s (Patrick Wilson) first daughter. Mavis takes this as a sign – that she should go back to her hometown Mercury, Minnesota and rekindle their relationship. Never mind that he’s happily married.
The work of writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, who worked together previously to great acclaim on Juno, Young Adult is a much darker, less easy-to-like affair. The reason for that is because – well, look at that synopsis – Mavis is kind of a dick. She is selfish, immature, haughty; listen how she disdainfully explains that her books are not for children to another character, who she clearly thinks incapable of understanding such things; ‘it’s YA – Young Adult fiction – it’s an industry term.’
She struts through her hometown with a smirk, like the local-girl-made-good everyone must surely be in awe of. Of course, she is too willing to explain, she’s in town on some ‘real estate thing’ – to sell one of her many properties, one is to infer. And of course, that is a lie. Mavis lies a lot, sometimes in the most impressively deluded way. She consistently writes fictions into her life and at several times introduces metaphors that are as adolescent and clichéd as her writing must be. At one point Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), to whom she is variously cruel and friendly, calls her on it.
Really, Mavis’ life is not it’s cracked up to be. We already know that, seeing how she gets hammered every night, barely dresses unless to seduce or impress, and pulls compulsively at her own hair. Snobby and narcissisistic, she is nevertheless addicted to bad food, bad tv and alcohol – and in a brief moment of self-awareness in the company of her parents, when she confesses she might be an alcoholic, she is signifcantly not listened to.
And so it is chiefly because of Theron’s fearless realisation of such a creation that you come to enjoy Young Adult. Theron is a total hoot, doing something you couldn’t have previously imagined her doing. It’s perhaps inevitable that the film would build plot-wise to a desparately uncomfortable confrontation, but Young Adult has the courage to end on an ambiguous note, just when you think things are going to wrap up too neatly for this character.
Funny, dark and with something to say, Young Adult is a surprisingly satisfying film. Most important, however, is that in Mavis Gary the film offers one of the most fully-rounded characters in recent memory and for that deserves your attention. That Theron didn’t get an Oscar nomination for this is beyond belief.
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