Movie Review: "Young Adult" (Jason Reitman, 2011)

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: BEAUTY AND FOLLY

IN REITMAN'S FOURTH by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

 Above: Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary

 

It is perilous to make a movie about a character's personality, which Jason Reitman has done three times. Here's how it goes--Mr. Reitman presents an outrageously corrupt character and uses their moral ambiguity as a perpetual punchline. This talented, not yet fully seasoned filmmaker, is the equivalent of a standup comedian shouting, "Haha, Nick Naylor thinks smoking is good! Haha, Ryan Bingham thinks friendship is bad!" It's what makes his movies sometimes feel like meticulous comic unbuttoning of people's moral perspectives than a natural unspooling of a part of their lives.

           That's a criticism I would ascribe to the aimless "Thank You For Smoking" (Mr. Reitman's first film), the superior airport sonata "Up in the Air", and also his newest project, "Young Adult" ("Juno" is the smiling, touching exception to this rule). If "Young Adult" (which was written by Diablo Cody) feels just as schematic as "Up in the Air", it is also just as interesting because it is a portrait of a woman who is at once repulsive and also the emobidment of all our secret fantasies.

            That woman is Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), author of a young adult series of books known as "Waverly Prep". She has a fabulous apartment, a terrific wardrobe and a very cute dog named Dolce. And yet, editor Dana E. Glauberman clearly shows that Mavis' life is monotonous. Her entire routine seems like a tedious process of constant stopping and starting. She watches TV, then stops. She starts writing, then stops. She sleeps with a man whose face we never even see. Stop.

             Aparently, Mavis finds this routine as chic and dreary as we do because it doesn't take her long to hit the road in her red mini cooper, on a mission to recapture her now happily married high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). What follows is some of the more discomforting scenes of the year. Mavis' attempts to tempt Buddy from his family are at once artful and embarressingly blatant. There's only one thing to think through the whole movie--When is this going to backfire? When is all her conspiratorial nastiness (along with her narcissism and alcoholism) going to explode for everyone to see?

             It is difficult to explain what happens next without spoiling the movie's best surprises. For the most part, "Young Adult" plays out the way you might expect--Mavis slathers her face in makeup and tries win Buddy, but she can't because like the heroes of "Thank You For Smoking" and "Up in the Air", she is in many ways a punchline. Her unabashed selfishness (locking her dog out on her balcony is the first and least of her mistakes) is up there to be exposed, for us to laugh at.

           There comes a moment when Mavis has a chance at redemption, a chance at being as happy as Buddy and his friends (who groove to amateur in town rock bands) are. Devastated by her own failings she turns to her friend Matt (Patton Oswalt), bawling, "Nobody loves me." He replies, "Men like me are born loving women like you."

          And why shouldn't he? Mavis is ballsy and beautiful--her personality may be beyond obnoxious, but she is truly attractice in spite of it. The film ultimately acknowledges that we don't really want her to change, because she's living a venomous, glamorous fantasy. We all dream of being bad and beautiful at least sometimes, and she is exactly that. There is also the fact that she is in her own bizarre way an individual. Everyone in the movie keeps saying that she has "problems" and even though it is obvious that that is true, the thought of her being dragged into therapy and being tempered and reformed is still a little sickening.

          What "Young Adult" shows more than anything is how easy we fall for physical beauty--even with a hilariously dark hearted ending like this film pops like a cork, any movie about an attractive yet deeply troubled soul can never be a hard sell. What makes the film both inconclusive and deeply satisfying is the way it acknowledges our obsession of surface beauty, criticizing but also accepting that no matter how much we ridicule our shallowness, it can't be trumped.

         Mavis Gary is a mean mess. She pulls her hair out, plucks her cuticles, wears Hello Kitty shirts, is perpetually drunk, and wears painfully full wigs. Yet as she prepares to go home in that Mini Cooper, standing before its hood with battered confidence, it is hard not to buy into the perfect myth that she wants her life to be.

          It's hard to hate pretty people.