Young Adult (2011)

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.

by Danielle Lee

I was a little worried, going to see Young Adult during a visit to my suburban California home town, that I would too readily identify with main character Mavis Gary, played by Charlize Theron.

A 37-year-old that too easily wriggles into the shallow high school characters she writes for a once-popular YA (industry shorthand, she explains to Sweet Valley-deficient philistines) series, Mavis is a mean, divorced, depressed alcoholic. So, instead of solely prompting the giggling, knowing nods of recognition I expected, Young Adult’s story of Mavis returning to her small Minnesota hometown to win back her high school sweetheart earned cringes, guffaws and tears.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t moments of intense familiarity.

One of the comforting bastions of enduring singlehood is routine. And I’m not talking to-do list, book club, Crock-Pot routine. Though that’s nice and important, too.

But the Mavis routine: the spitting in your dying ink cartridge, passing out clutching a wine glass stem, eating gas station junk food and chugging Diet Coke for breakfast, no-one-can-see-or-judge-me routine.

And essential to this safety is our net. Director Jason Reitman rightly lingers on these rituals, as well as their environs.

After Mavis, prompted by the birth announcement of her former flame and his wife, rashly jumps into her Mini Cooper, travels back to town and checks into a hotel, she sets up camp. She plugs in her MacBook. She hangs up her authentically late-20s-early-30s single woman clothing; a mix of enticing leather, flattering corporate chic and grubby hoodies and jeans. She unzips her Pomeranian from her carrier bag. She flips on the TV, hilariously continuing the endless Kardashian death march she had just hours ago flipped off back in her sloppy Minneapolis apartment.

This camera inventory is important. From the all-important bathroom sink dump of too-large toiletries and hair products to the soothing shriek of Kourtney Kardashian, Mavis has rooted herself - and is now prepared to set in motion a series of bad decisions, triggered by a faux-casual voicemail to ex-boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson).

He returns her call, fumbling with a breast pump in his kitchen as she enters the local bar, promising to catch up with her at dinner the next day.

Filled with sudden confidence in winning back this wholesomely nice yet contentedly married ex, and then with plenty of whiskey after entering the dimly lit dive, Mavis soon confesses her diabolical plan to fellow patron and former classmate Matt. Crippled back in high school by a quasi-hate crime (they thought he was gay), Matt would already be a sympathetic character, but a wonderful Patton Oswalt gives him more dimensions, as Mavis’ equally bitter but scrupulous foil.

He voices us, the audience, as we watch Mavis, the next night, don a plunging black cocktail dress to meet Buddy at Champ O’Malley’s, famous for their popcorn shrimp. Talk about how busy and important she is in the city. Enthusiastically accept a future invitation to attend the concert of his wife’s band at that very sports bar establishment, in hopes of then sealing the deal.

And what we’re all saying is: Aghghghghhhhh!

Mavis doesn’t hear much though, from Matt or any other adults. Instead, she hones in on the asinine conversations of teenagers around her as chatter to plug into her book, the last of the series she ghostwrites.

As well as a realistically hilarious send-up of the YA genre, I like to think these scenes are a sly nod by writer Diablo Cody to some of the backlash she endured for her Oscar-winning script for Juno (which also paired her with Reitman). I was a part of that chorus, appreciating Juno’s heart but rolling my eyes at dialogue unfit for the photo-caption puns of a high school yearbook. Considering Cody’s otherwise zeitgeisty ear and appetite for pop culture, I wouldn’t be surprised if she sneaked in some of these overheard conversations (“textual chemistry” is one) as both a reminder that some of us critics are just out of touch with how the Facebook generation speaks and an acknowledgment that she was having some fun.

Either way, the moment when Mavis eventually uses the worst of these pubescent gems out loud, instead of on her MacBook, in a painful seduction of Buddy, is the apex of her humiliation.

Here her past trauma, only hinted at before to Matt as an attempt to cruelly shake him of the continued haunting of his attack, is predictably revealed. Less predictable in its nature than its existence, as her character—jabs at Matt and passes at married men included—had gotten so unsympathetically awful at this point that both catalyst and empathy were desperately needed for the audience.

But Mavis’ personal struggles are thankfully no immediate salve to her behavior, a testament to both the writing and Theron’s great performance. Any redemption arc at the end of the movie is as realistically self-serving as most of her actions preceding it. It helps that those around her, even at her lowest point, still treat her as a wondrous big-city celebrity. Two even function as actual mirrors, in those final scenes.

These two are overjoyed at Mavis’ intense concentration on their faces, their long overdue chance to be fully seen by the popular bitch from high school. But in those earnest faces, Mavis sees herself, and her choices. They reflect her past glory faster than the hotel mirror had earlier captured her age-defying beatification routine.

Among people so eager to serve and glorify her, Mavis can either take this as an opportunity to finally let go of her “baggage,” as she calls it, and at least work toward these exalted expectations…or she can continue her internal retreat, now with echo chamber.

The question of whether she grows up, asked in the film’s tag line, isn’t answered—and shouldn’t be. There is no endpoint, but a series of reflections. Some are ugly, some subtle, and some made in the hideous lighting of a hotel bathroom.

I had a few, slinking out of the theater in my familiar leather jacket. Maybe my defensive, big-city bravado was tempered by the realization that I would soon return to my couch in New York, free-styling country lyrics over Bravo reality TV outros and eating pineapple out of the can.

If I looked closely at the scattered faces glancing over at me on our way out of the theater, I could see that, too.

Danielle Lee still wonders how Charlize Theron’s character planned to win her man back without adorably crashing into any potted plants or face-planting a glass door. She tumbls (less than adorably) here.