I am a huge fan of Jason Reitman and I
have seen all of his movies. I think he is one of the most skilled
young directors of this generation. And I still have a special place
in my heart for his funny, touching comedy Juno. So I was very
excited when he decided to direct another movie by Juno scribe Diablo
Cody. The result was Young Adult, a movie as polished as it is
pointless.
The plot centers around Mavis, played
by the talented Charlize Theron (This is the 3rd Theron
movie in a row I have reviewed. That woman has been busy!). Mavis
is a ghost-writer for a young adult series of novels. She lives a
life that I think some college students imagine adult life should be.
She eats junk, plays video games, has meaningless hookups and goes
shopping whenever she wants. She is completely free. But when she
finds out her high school boyfriend has just had a baby, she decides
to travel to her hometown to win him back. While in town, she meets
and hangs out with a high school classmate Matt, played by Patton
Oswald.
I write “hangs out with” rather than “befriends”
because Mavis does not seem capable of making actual friends.
Everyone around her is simply a means to her end, including Matt.
Matt was mistaken for gay in high school and was horribly beaten,
leaving him permanently crippled. Or as Theron puts it, “Oh,
you're the hate crime guy!”
If the plot seems horrible, it is.
Thankfully, the filmmakers never have you root for Mavis. She is a
horrible person who sets out to do a horrible thing. But because
Mavis is so awful, the movie falls horribly flat. We are meant to
judge her, hate her, and in turn pity her. There are reasons for her
arrested development, but making her the protaganist means that we
cannot attach to the journey. Like an Alexander Payne movie, the
characters really do not grow or learn from their mistakes. Mavis is
smart and sometimes very funny, but she is too self-centered. She is
the dark side of Juno MacGuff who was also smart, funny, and
self-centered, but came to realize that her actions had consequences
and learned from those mistakes. Mavis is not as mature.
The performances are excellent,
however. Theron plays the part perfectly and without sympathy.
Patton Oswald does a dramatic turn here as someone who could have
easily been simply “the Good Guy,” but instead shows a
vulnerability and a dark side that shows that maybe he is just as
messed up as Mavis but cannot get away with his horribly behavior
because he is a schlubby loser. Reitman keeps the story flowing and
makes it visually interesting. He has a talent for getting us into
the heads of flawed people. But Mavis is too far gone for us to
care.
In Thank You For Smoking,
Reitman made the mendacious Nick Naylor sympathetic by making all of
his enemies as bad as himself.
In Juno, the main character
finds happiness only when she stops putting herself first.
And in Up
in the Air, George Clooney's Ryan Bingham was like Theron's
Mavis, but Reitman let us see how life began to open and change for
him. But Mavis' enemies are all good people and she is not open to
looking beyond herself and changing.
This could be a good character study as
to how selfishness leads to unhappiness. Mavis cannot understand how
anyone in her hometown could be happy with family and friends and
good jobs and simple pleasures. Her self-indulgence blinds her to
the higher happiness all around her. In fact she and Matt resent
people who are happier than they. It reminds me of the dwarves from
CS Lewis' The Last Battle.
They surrounded by happiness and beauty, but they refuse to open
their eyes and accept it. I think that is true of all of us and our
particular vices and indulgences. We sometimes can't imagine living
without them and so we imagine those without them are missing out.
But like Mavis, we will remain empty so long as we keep trying to
fill that bottomless void we call the ego.
2
out of 5 stars.
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