Young Adult

I recently wrote about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, one of my favorite movies from the past few years. I also loved Juno and thought Thank You For Smoking was good for a first time director, if not quite a great film. With his track record, Reitman has become one of my favorite directors, the type whose new movies I look forward to regardless of what they are about. So I was excited to learn that he had teamed up again with Diablo Cody, the screenwriter of Juno, on the film Young Adult. When I learned more about the movie’s story, I became even more interested in seeing it. It is about Mavis Gary, a young adult fiction writer and former high school popular girl, played by Charlize Theron, who returns to her hometown from the big city in order to win back her high school boyfriend and save him from his boring life of marriage and fatherhood. I glanced at a few reviews and interviews with the filmmakers, which all mentioned how unlikable Theron’s character is. This definitely sounded like a movie I would like to see, as I enjoy characters who are not the typical heroes, and I recognize how challenging it is for storytellers to center a plot on a character who does not ordinarily elicit audience sympathy. I went in with high expectations. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, expectations can make a big difference, and often it’s dangerous to expect too much.

As I sat in the theater, I tried to stave off a sense of disappointment. Though I laughed a few times, I was expecting it on a whole to be funnier, a darker version of Juno’s quirky humor. The acting was excellent, and the film was well directed by Reitman, but I felt like the script wasn’t quite solid. Often, the dialogue felt too direct, where the subtext was stated explicitly instead of hinted at. For instance, at one point, Theron’s character, Mavis, says to her parents that she thinks she may be an alcoholic. Would a person in that situation genuinely say that? Another example: she reveals her plan to steal her ex-boyfriend from his wife to another former classmate (the great Patton Oswalt) with whom she has spent an evening drinking. Would she so bluntly say such a thing? By the end of the film, I was glad I had seen it and enjoyed it overall, but left feeling that somehow it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.

But then I was surprised. I couldn’t stop thinking about this movie. For a week, the film continued to play out in my mind. I believe I’ve mentioned in previous posts the concept of resonance. That is what I look for in what I would classify as being more substantial works of art. I love a good light comedy or exciting action flick now and again, but they tend to be ephemeral. What I love more is the type of movie that continues to bounce around in my head after it’s over, that I wrestle with or feel continued emotion from, that for whatever reason strikes me like I’m a tuning fork, leaving me vibrating afterward. Young Adult had that effect on me.

What I initially distrusted as being too explicitly stated dialogue, I now see as being far more subtle. Would Mavis tell her parents she thinks she’s an alcoholic? Yes. She has had serious emotional problems for years, which have been largely ignored by both her and her parents. They know that she has a habit of pulling out her own hair, but rather than encouraging her to seek psychiatric help or providing her with that help when she was young, they simply tell her she shouldn’t do that because she has such beautiful hair and it’s a shame to mess it up. This family is clearly dysfunctional and has provided no basis for Mavis to grow into a mature woman, so she has been self-medicating to treat her depression and other problems (she is a narcissist, borderline personality, or maybe even a psychopath). But she wants help. All of her actions seem to have surface motives: she wants to steal her ex-boyfriend back in order to return to the happier days of high school. But those actions have much deeper motives: she wants help. She needs change in her life. So when she tells her parents she thinks she’s an alcoholic, it isn’t merely an observation or a fresh realization—of course she’s an alcoholic—it is her way of asking her parents for a response, to do something to help her, to say something comforting; but her parents simply deny the problem.

The same thing is true when she talks with Patton Oswalt’s character, Matt. On the surface it seems like he is largely a sounding board for her to reveal the details of her plot, but there’s far more going on. She recognizes him as a fellow misfit and is searching for some human connection. Part of the struggle faced by Mavis is that she has never needed to work very hard for surface connections. She is so beautiful that popularity came easily in high school, and since then she has managed to continue coasting on those looks. In one scene, she goes on a date set up by an Internet dating service. The man mentions charity work he has done, and Mavis initially thinks he is complaining the way she would about being stuck in traffic. She starts to sympathize (“That sounds awful”) until she realizes that her date is proud of his accomplishments, so she quickly changes tack. It’s clear her date is far too good for her, but the next morning, he is beside her in bed with his arm wrapped around her body. Mavis can be a terrible person deep down and still get the guy because her surface is so appealing, and because her surface is so appealing, she’s never had to develop anything beneath that surface. But as life wears on and she destroys herself with alcohol, she will not be able to rely on those looks like she used to. When she spends time with Matt, it is due to her desire to reach out and connect with someone, even someone she would consider so far beneath her.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to state that by the end of the movie, little has changed in Mavis’s life. Many of the reviews I’ve looked at address this point, even suggesting that she is less likable at the end of the movie than she is at the beginning, which may be true. So is this a failure? Do stories need to be centered on a character’s change or growth? I remember when I was a graduate student studying creative writing, students in workshops often attacked short stories for lack of character change, the assumption being that a story requires some change within a character or it is a failed story. I disagreed with this assumption and have since encountered a much better explanation for what a good story requires: the opportunity for change. A character should either change (for the better or for the worse) or face a last chance to change and fail to do so. This failure to change is a much harder story to tell well, which is why, I think, so many grad students think it’s impossible. But Young Adult is an example of a successful story of this kind. Mavis desperately wants change, but she is incapable of it; in the end she returns to the same life she’s been living and probably will live until drinking herself to an early death.

This movie certainly is not for everyone. It features a despicable lead character who fails to grow and learn from her mistakes. It is not uplifting by any means. But it is realistic. And for me, it resonated.