Ostensibly, Young Adult is a story of arrested development and perpetual adolescence; however, it’s not the comedy that the previews portend it to be. There are funny moments, but they are, intentionally, uncomfortable, leaving you unsure if the laughter is from circumstance or to cover its depressing reality; in a way, you indulge in the catharsis that Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) cannot. No matter how many times she’s mani’d, pedi’d, plucked, and shaved, the dark bags under her eyes bespeak a detached life besotted with loneliness and sadness.
Living in a high rise apartment in Minneapolis, Mavis has escaped the tiny burg of Mercury, Minnesota, where people are “hostages” to their own ordinariness. Her departure has caparisoned her visage with an illusion of success: fame as an author — sort of – to those who read The Sun, the local Mercury newspaper that keeps the townies updated on the events in “the Mini-apple.” In reality, she’s “basically a ghost writer,” a notation on the inside cover under the creator of a young-adult-fiction series that has been cancelled pending the completion of the final book. The interior of her apartment is in shambles, covered in yesterweek’s clothes and stocked with junk food, particularly her morning beverage of Diet Coke, something she swills from a two liter bottle to quell the hangover from last night’s alcohol concoction whose drained bottles reside on her night stand, a common occurrence whether she wakes up face down on her own bed or in a hotel in Mercury.
The closest semblance of the glamour that her home town imagines is her penchant for living vicariously through the reality television shows Keeping Up With the Kardshians and Kendra. And it is in these beginning scenes that Young Adult establishes itself as a study of manufacturing – beginning with the oxymoronic title that has become rather ubiquitous in our vernacular. And, maybe this is where director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body) are criticizing the categorization of “young adult” as a marketing tool for novels that Mavis herself admits are “disturbingly popular.” I’m not suggesting that Cody is trying to bring down the “Young Adult” market in Barnes and Noble or any other uberbookstore, but the categorization itself is a bit nefarious and blurs the line between adolescence and adulthood, not necessarily combining them, but eliding the former. No longer are adolescents “kids” or “teens” – this has become associated with immaturity; instead, they are pre-adults, with “adult” connoting maturity and experience, something that the target audiences are lacking and are mostly unprepared for. Ironically, so is Mavis Gary.
As Gary, Theron is stellar. She has done little since her Oscar-winning turn in Monster, and it’s too her benefit to have avoided such overexposure. Each glare that she casts is less about recovering love lost and more about emotional self-flagellation. One of the more awkwardly telling moments is when Gray meets up with the objection of her obsession, the married Buddly Slade (Patrick Wilson) who now has a kid in tow, at his wife’s performance (she and other mothers have formed a band). As the crowd cheers for the adequately performed songs and embraces the parenting and socializing, Gray stands near Buddy, recalling the first time that she performed oral sex on him and how it happened to the very song his wife is playing – Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept,” which, coincidentally, is the cassette-tape relegated song that Gary listens to on a loop in her journey from Minneapolis to Mercury.
With lyrics that include “She won’t be forced against her will/Says she don’t do drugs but she does the pill” and the oft-repeated “I didn’t want to hurt you,” this song perfectly embodies Mavis’ legacy. She is a rebel; her greatest weapon and appeal is sex; and, she’s filled with regrets. Even the title itself is directly linked to Mavis’ persona in that her existence and the aura that surrounds her is merely a “concept.” Like Matt Freehauf’s (Patton Oswalt) amalgamated GI Joes, Mavis is a composited construct of external perception.
In addition to Theron’s performance, another strength of Young Adult is its structure. This film is not bogged down by flashbacks and flashforwards. Instead, we live with Gray, her idiosyncrasies, and we slowly watch her spiral closer and closer to rock bottom, which makes the third act’s reveal of Gray even more powerful: she’s a delusional, paranoid alcoholic. She not just a perpetual adolescent or an idolater of Khloe Kardashian. She’s depressed. She’s lost. She’s blatantly dismissed because her life has been idealized. In a sense, her situation can be tied back to the issues surrounding the “young adult” phenomenon. Clearly, this is not to prophecy that all “young adult fiction readers” are on the road to ruin; however, throughout Young Adult, Gary exists as a byproduct of someone who wanted to grow up too fast. Whether the byword for maturity was drinking, drugs, or sex, Gary’s adolescence was seemingly obfuscated and overlaid with the illusory connotations of maturity.
Young Adult is not as witty as Up in the Air. It’s not as political as Thank You for Smoking, and it’s not as charming as Juno. Nor should it be. Reitman is versatile, and, much to my chagrin, Cody writes various multi-layered, rather poignant scripts – even the panned Jennifer’s Body, which I’m convinced would have been palatable had someone informed Megan Fox that the film was a dark comedy, not a pseudo-serious suspense film, but I digress. In the end, Young Adult is a film unto itself that explores the perils of perception and self-destruction in a world marketed on idealized expectations and presumptions. And even though Kendal, Gary’s fictional heroine through which she lives vicariously, plans to “blaze a trail” at the close of her novel (and the final scene of the movie), it’s obvious that Gary has been enabled enough to prevent her bones from shattering as she falls to the figurative “bottom,” but she’s clearly still spiraling.
