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| You might know someone like her in real life.
Film Critic Tom Long aptly called Young Adult “the year's most engaging feel-bad movie.”
Academy Award winner Charlize Theron gives a highly convincing performance as Mavis Gary, a 37-year-old beautiful but lonely, complex, and depressed small-time Young Adult series ghost writer who returns to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota to try and get back together with her high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson)—who happens to be a married man and a new dad.
Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), together with Theron’s impressively raw and multi-layered performance, have created a realistically fascinating character who manages to break your heart, makes you feel awkward, makes you suffer from secondhand embarrassment, and makes you feel disgusted all at the same time.
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| Mavis at a bar, an old high school hangout in small-town Mercury.
Mavis Gray is figuratively a young adult, who has gotten old but never really grew up and is still pathetically stuck in the past, in her glory days as the popular girl in high school. The film immediately establishes the ugly and painful ending to Mavis’ story. From the moment Mavis packs her stuff on an impulse and drives back home to steal a married man from his wife and newborn daughter, you start bracing yourself with bated breath for her inevitable humiliation and failure. Here is a beautiful woman who will soon embarrass herself, and all you can do is watch as she carefully puts on her make-up, get a manicure, curl her hair, excited to meet her ruggedly handsome ex-boyfriend Buddy.
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| Patrick Wilson as Buddy Slade. |
The movie is a dark and wryly humorous commentary of a sociopath-- one of those functional but embarrassingly crazy characters you meet in real life (and could even be a friend of yours). The movie’s funny moments are laced with pain and sarcasm, and the heartbreaking moments are more felt in silent moments, in small actions, and fleeting looks.
Reitman gives us a movie that excellently captures emotions with depth, through guises and subtleties, and even in blank expressions. Young Adult is brilliant filmmaking, a strong character-driven plot, highly engaging, funny, and depressing. Theron gives an excellent performance, wholly transforming into the beautifully portrayed complex and sorry character of Mavis.
Mavis may be a sociopath, but maybe the reason why we feel sorry for her is because somehow we are her in one way or another.
4.5 out of 5 stars
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