Review: Young Adult

My exact thoughts prior to seeing Young Adult: “From the Director of Up In the Air…” Oh my flip, that film was amazing. It was totally my 3rd favourite film of 2010, man I dug that film. “…and the writer of Juno.” My word, talk about a dream team duo, I loved Juno it was the film that made me fall in love with Ellen Page. Its official, Young Adult is going to be totally amazing, expectations are high. This is going to be great.

It wasn’t. Man, I was so disappointed.

Young Adult tells the tale of Mavis Gray (Theron) a former prom queen who has found her true calling as the ghost writer of a fading popular series of tween novels about an awesomely popular girl and her adventures in High School. Whilst all of Gray’s high school peers have moved on and grown up she has stayed in perma-youth, hanging out in joggers, watching trashy TV, getting loaded and reliving the glory days through her ghost written novels. One day she receives an email notification from her old high school flame Buddy, announcing the birth of his daughter. Gray decides to travel down to her old home town and sets in motion her master plan to get Buddy back.


With a plan and a protagonist as duplicitous and nefarious as that it’s no wonder that Mavis is a bit of a dick, a very one dimensional cliché I found it near impossible to find any redeeming features in. Any time she displays even the merest glimmer of a warm heart beneath that bitchy ice queen exterior it is swiftly dispatched by a wry put down, a withering glance or a blank stare. There are inklings throughout that Mavis is a few sandwiches short of a picnic but due to her sheer incessant nastiness I found it very hard to care. There are many moments laid before you that all but scream “YOU SHOULD SYMPATHISE WITH HER!”, throughout it is achingly clear to see that she has a drinking problem, the first time we see her she is passed out on her bed surrounded in the detritus of a heavy night, and her drinking is used to “comic” effect throughout the film hammering home the alcoholism point with all the subtlety of a fluorescent donkey.  There are attempts to humanise Gray later in the film but it’s a severe case of too little too late, and it seems that as soon as those lessons have presented themselves to her she swiftly ignores them and reverts to old habits. Mavis’ sheer nastiness is all the more irksome because to director Jason Reitman this should be his bread and butter. From Aaron Eckhart in Thank you for Smoking to the sublime George Clooney in Up in the air Reitman has done a stellar job in taking fundamentally unlikeable characters and making you root and care for them. Clooney plays a man who fires people for a living yet he is charming, loveable and a fellow who by the end you thoroughly care for. I think the problem lies in the writing, Up in the Air and Thank you for smoking were both directed and written by Reitman giving him greater control over his characters, here writer duties are given over to Diablo Cody, who whilst being an undeniable talent in quirky teen dialogue doesn’t exactly have a reign on depth and development (Just look at Jason Bateman’s character in Juno who’s character arc, not being fully formed, left us questioning the legitimacy of his departure.) 

The humble townspeople of her “hick hometown” are very nice though, thoroughly pleasant apple pie Americans that portray Young Adult’s only flicker of warmth and heart albeit in a somewhat two dimensional manner. They provide the polar opposite to Gray, giving Theron chance to bounce off their hometown wide eyed awe with her icy bitchiness and granted, on more than one occasion there are some very good jokes, quality lines and killer exchanges of dialogue, but alas, that is not enough to save this film. The loveable home town folk are reduced to nothing more than fat, stupid hicks by Mavis and that idea is one that barely budges and at one point is all but yelled directly at us. Patton Oswalt deserves a special mention, delivering easily the film’s best performance as self confessed fat geek, Matt Freehauf. His performance is funny, touching and handled with a levity and deft hand that make him intensely likeable and pityable, two qualities that Theron’s Mavis is hugely lacking. The most irritating thing about Freehauf however is the way we leave him, I don’t want to spoil anything but I think such a lovely and important character deserves more than what he gets, send off wise. The big problem with Young Adult comes from it being thoroughly muddled, it’s not funny enough to be an out and out comedy and it’s not clever or well constructed enough to be something smarter. Annoyingly there are snatches in Young Adult of a far better film, more than once I could see it heading somewhere better, somewhere with more of a Juno/Up in the Air vibe but it always crash landed back to where it had been before. It was a decent enough film but the sheer dislike I had for Mavis Gray and utter desire I had for it to be something better really soured it for me. 


Young Adult has some very interesting themes to explore. It examines prolonged adolescence and what it means to live with some defining moment for the whole of your life. It tries to dissect what youth is and how it affects people, especially those who can’t quite get over their past. On paper this looks to be a really interesting character study but Young Adult never really gets going, it annoyingly skirts over all these topics leaving us somewhat in the lurch. For a film with such potential it is very slight on actual delivery. 


Also one last thing, the message at the end, the way the film ends generally. Not good. Not good

SO