In the buzz surrounding Young Adult, the Diablo Cody movie starring Charleze Theron, there was a fair amount of hand-wringing over whether the protangonist was too unlikeable. Or more specifically, whether audiences would connect to Mavis (Theron), a 30 something babe who ghost writes Sweet Valley High-type books. Maybe I’m not a proper barometer of mass-appeal, but I like movies better when the main character is unlikeable. This can backfire, of coarse. You have to be willing to spend ninety-plus minutes with the person. But far too often, you get the distinct feeling that Hollywood hero and heroines are whitewashed of their faults, until they are bland potatos stumbling towards pre-packaged epiphanies. Thankfully, that’s not the case in Young Adult.
In the movie, directed by Jason Reitman, Mavis descends upon her Minnesota hometown, hell bent on winning back her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson). The fact that Buddy is happily married with a newborn kid means very little together. Somewhere along the line, Mavis has started to believe the true love and destiny claptrap that fills her books, and in her mind, Buddy and her are “meant to be together.” With this mindset, his whole life, his wife, his kid, are only minor problems that together they can overcome. Shacked up in the local Best Western, she starts spending a lot of time with local sadsack Matt (Patton Oswalt), a dork who she systematically ignored in high school. In a lot of ways, Oswalt saves the movie. Mavis is a sassy, mean and funny main character, but she can only really express her feelings with Matt as a foil. They spend a lot of time drinking in bars, and Matt isn’t afraid to tell Mavis she’s nuts to her face.
I saw this movie in the suburbs, and found myself laughing much harder and more often than the rest of the audience. Much of Cody’s humor balances between endorsing and criticizing Mavis’ hyper-critical ways. She looks down her pretty nose at all these suburbanites with their boring, happy families and weekly dinners at Chili’s. Speaking of Chili’s, director Reitman continues his knack for stuffing his movies to the gills with product placements. While Up in the Air felt like a 2 hourlong American Airlines ad, Young Adult tries to have it both ways, featuring countless fast food chains that the main character mocks and thinks are charmless, but eats at anyways.
All in all, I found Young Adult much more compelling than Cody’s previous hit, Juno. Whereas Juno often felt smug and aggresively twee, Young Adult is funny and cringworthy, a comedy that not afraid to go all in with its train-wreck heroine.
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