Tag Archives: young-adult

young adult is all about mavis, played by charlize theron.  she’s a catty, haughty superficial seeming woman who writes children’s books (the young adult of the title comes from the genre she works in) and drinks too much.  she has a tiny dog that she neglects.  i got the impression that the dog is just a prop for her, much like a lot of miniature dogs ‘hot’ girls in the media tote around.  she is seen going on a date with a guy she doesn’t seem interested in at all but still sleeps with.  she only seems to watch silly reality television.  it plays even while she sleeps.

she almost seems to have a kind of autism or aspergers in that she barely seems able to pick up on social cues.  some parts of her seem like a role she is playing.  she doesn’t seem to have her own identity.  she behaves how the ‘hot’ girl is supposed to behave, i guess.  she barely seems to listen when people talk and only really hears things that reinforce her delusion.  it’s an odd but very strong character, and charlize theron comports herself nicely in this relentlessly bleak role.

after getting a picture of her high school boyfriend’s new baby in a group email, she decides for some reason to go try to win him back, i guess for nostalgia’s sake.    her reasoning is never very strong.

the film tells the tale of her return to her hometown of mercury, minnesota and her misadventures.  the ‘boyfriend’ is happily married, but she is undeterred.  she runs into matt, played by patton oswalt, who was one of the many people in high school she ignored.  but of course he remembers her very well.

they form an unlikely friendship as she goes about her misdirected woo and generally makes a fool of her self several times, to varying results as far as entrainment value goes.  of course, mavis and matt they are much the same character in many ways, but due to a horrible assault in high school, the matt character is allowed to seem righteous, whereas she enters and leaves the film essentially unredeemed.

the movie has some sharply funny moments by both theron and oswalt.  she does it through a nearly constant glaring condescension that hardly waivers, and he does it through … well, through being patton oswalt.

what bothers me about the film is this:  she is senselessly obsessed with her past, which might be understandable because in her mind it was the best and most glowing part of her life.  however, what’s weird is that everyone in town seems just as obsessed.  everyone she comes into contact has the same, morbid fascination with her past and their interactions with her in high school.  it wears thin that 10 or 15 years after high school, that’s all that these people talk about when it comes to her.  she’s a raging narcissist and the universe of characters exists only reinforce her condition.

even her parents have kept her room and the car she drove in high school all these years.  that really happens in this movie.  so she goes in her room.  everything is just as she might have left it the day she graduated school.  she gets in her old car and drives off somewhere in her high school sweater.  it’s cheap and silly.

at a table with her parents, as they are talking about her ex husband (again talking about her past), she blurts out that she thinks she is an alcoholic.  they seem to not hear her, but the scene ends just after that.   i don’t know if this was meant to show how she got to be how she is or what, but she hardly seems to be really reaching out.  she hadn’t even called her family to tell them she was in town.  they heard she was about and went looking for her, so who knows.

another silly thing that happens:  at one point she is watching a soap opera and a silly line about love is uttered.  later, when declaring her love for her old boyfriend, she plagiarizes the line from the television show.  this seemed an odd thing for a professional writer of gushy teen novels to do.

young adult starts out promising by setting a snarky, detached, narcissistic tone, but after a while of it, after you realize her character is probably not going to change or grow, you don’t like her anymore and you cease to care about what happens to her.

the last 20 minutes of the film draw out very slowly.  there’s a tacked on scene with matt’s sister which seems oddly misplaced and unnecessary, but the movie isn’t done with you for a few minutes more.

this could have been an interesting film.  but as it is, i didn’t care about any of these characters.