'Young Adult' a bleak film that fails its promise
Reviewer's Rating ★★ 1/2
Screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Ivan Reitman and a disarming pair of young leads, Ellen Page and Michael Cera, made the unconventional 2007 teen story, Juno, a hit and an Oscar winner for its screenplay. Despite the big challenges Page and Cera’s characters meet, their tale is a walk on the bright side.
On the contrary, the new collaboration from Reitman and Cody stumbles through the dark end of town. Despite parallels to Juno, Young Adult contains an unlovable, irredeemable protagonist and a bleak story built upon her fantasy and self-deception. Page’s Juno is charming, Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary is, to say the least, off-putting. Considering how beautiful Theron is, making her a woman who induces cringing is the screenplay’s greatest accomplishment.
Theron’s Mavis, a single, 37-year-old ghost writer of teen books, lives in Minneapolis. She’s also a slob. Her high-rise apartment looks as if it’s home to a sloppy single guy 25 or younger who has no regard for hygiene.
Mavis lives a narrow and joyless existence. Other than her often-ignored little dog, the occasional loveless hookup and unanswered phone calls from an anxious editor, she’s alone. Nonetheless, Mavis is glad to be away from the little hometown she grew up in and escaped from. She’s doesn’t even go back to see her parents — until she learns that her high school flame, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), and his wife, are the parents of a baby girl.
The news grabs Mavis’ attention. She bolts homeward on a Quixotic mission to reclaim the unsuspecting Buddy, the man she suddenly believes is her true love. Never mind that he hasn’t seen her in years, he’s happily married, thrilled about being a first-time dad and, unlike Mavis, not mentally ill.
In a dark, nearly comic, but not laugh-inspiring way, Mavis schemes to win Buddy. She dresses to kill, in the daytime. She gets physically aggressive with a man who, as anyone can see, is a faithful and loving spouse. Theron, an Oscar-winning actress, projects her character’s obsession and self-deceit with discomforting conviction.
Mavis dwells in an alternative universe and Theron portrays her with unsettling truth and impact.
Recalling Juno, Mavis finds a new friend back home in a local guy with a tragic past, another of her former high school peers.
A literally broken man yet mentally stable and accepting of his lesser lot in life, Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) doesn’t let Mavis’ madness stop him from sharing drinks and spending time with the one-time high school beauty who never even noticed him.
Marketed as a comedy, Young Adult is too bleak to be funny. And it turns outright dramatic in its third act. Not that anyone dies, but Mavis’ humiliation is such that she, and the film in general, paint themselves into a corner from which they don’t find a credible exit.
Young Adult, like its title character, has much talent and potential, but the movie and its anti-heroine underachieve in an undercooked project that reaches and fails to puts it promising pieces together.