Young Adult

Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt were terrific in this way-beyond-coming-of-age comedy about a thirty-something woman on an ill-advised quest to reconnect with her high school boyfriend, a married man who has just had a child. One thing I really appreciate about this one was how honest and reasonable it felt. A much simpler movie would have made the wife of the aforementioned ex-boyfriend an obviously terrible match, allowing the audience to easily root for her marriage to fail. A darker movie more interested in making Theron's character an anti-hero would have featured the actress just dripping with sex appeal and wrecking the shit out of that ex's home. Instead, the joke here is on Theron's immature character; the ex is perfectly happy, and although both he and his wife initially welcome his old flame back into their lives, that flame never comes close to being rekindled, at least on his end. Because this was a movie, and because we're trained to expect certain things from movies, I won't pretend I knew all along that nothing would happen between these two characters. But when nothing did happen - and when it happened in spectacularly embarrassing fashion for Theron - I was very happy with the movie's restraint and straightforward frankness. This is a sad, lonely woman, after all, and not some star-crossed lover who deserves this particular happy ending.

Theron plays Mavis, the one-time homecoming queen turned ghost author on a failing young adult series, with a perfect ice cold bitchy demeanor that surely would have fallen flat in the hands of a less talented or less beautiful actress. She's a genuinely bad person, openly flirting with her old flame in front of his wife and nurturing a disgust for being back in her hometown, which is the one place some people still recognize her for being such a popular high schooler. Yet underneath it all is an unconcealable emptiness; just about everyone around her has moved on, the way people tend to do at some point between senior year of high school and their thirty-fifth birthdays, but Mavis is clinging to that entitled popular girl attitude because, really, stuck in her arrested development, it's all she has.

Young Adult was a great movie. It wasn't drop-dead hilarious, and its "some people need to grow up" theme wasn't very original either, but this was still a fresh and enjoyable take on some old cliches. I'd see it again, gladly.