David O'ConnellYoung Adult
January 18th 2012 02:49
Proving Juno (2007) was no fluke hasn’t been easy for screenwriter Diablo Cody. Her follow up to the Oscar winner, lame horror black comedy Jennifer’s Body (2009) suffered horribly at the hands of critics; distressingly, the least of its problems was the casting of two of the less capable actresses of this or any other century, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. Her third produced screenplay, Young Adult (2011), is a welcome return to a formula that worked with Juno (minus the hip-speak), including the re-deployment of director Jason Reitman who, in the interim, only strengthened his credentials with the superb Up in the Air (2010).
Charlize Theron, in a career best turn, stars as Mavis Gary, a jaded ghostwriter of a young adult book series that has almost reached the end of its cycle of popularity. Aimless and bored in her Minneapolis home Mavis is mildly intrigued by an email from a friend in her home town Mercury asking her to join in celebration of a newborn child.
Though mortified by the thought of returning to this dead-end place, the presence of one man acts as powerful motivation. Mavis’s old flame Buddy (Patrick Wilson) is happily married with a child of his own but this doesn’t prevent Mavis from secretly concocting a fantasy in which she woos him back, returning them to a perfect youth she’s fragilely maintained in her head through the intervening years.
It’s this delusion which drives Mavis and eventually undercuts her attempts to reconcile with the past from a subjective vantage point that excludes Buddy's new reality. Though placed on a pedestal of sorts by townsfolk for her moderate writing success which allowed her to escape the town, Mavis has some serious emotional baggage, a fact that becomes more obvious as time passes. Her relationship with her parents is strained, whilst few of her schoolmates regard her with fondness despite their generally sociable demeanour in her presence.
As a makeshift confidante and sounding board Mavis uses Matt (Patton Oswalt), an outsider with emotional issues of his own stemming from a violent hate-crime episode in school which left him physically disabled. Their humourously developed relationship becomes the film’s emotional heart as, together, they poke at one another’s wounds, exposing the potential futility of a future so haunted by the past.
Cody’s screenplay is a multilayered gem, striking with painful jabs as often as it draws truthfulness from wry, observant laughter. When setting your character up for regular bouts of humiliation, will it be for the purpose of cheap laughs or to shed meaningful light on their troubled life? It’s no simple task to maintain a steady purchase without becoming fixated with one or the other but Cody has pulled it off magnificently. She owes a lot to her lead however, for Theron is one of the few actresses possessing classical beauty and yet is able to believably ‘tone down’ her appearance to persuade us of a grittier reality.
Young Adult opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, January 19.
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