31 Movies of May, Day 3: Young Adult
May 3rd viewing: Young Adult, selected by yours truly (donor-selected films return later this week - don’t worry, I’ll get to all of them!)
Year of Release: 2011
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written by: Diablo Cody
Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Collette Wolfe
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Amistosa (Mexican-style lager, 5.3% ABV) - Sketchbook Brewing, Evanston, Illinois
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)
Some movies find instant relevance in the cultural conversation, while others get instantly dismissed. Most tend to generally fade away, perhaps holding on to a few defenders, but largely winding up in anonymity.
Young Adult definitely holds on to some notable defenders, myself included among them, but it feels like it has mostly faded away from the larger consciousness. There are no ubiquitous GIFs from Young Adult that pop up in your timeline. It doesn’t regularly reappear on TV or in repertory cinema screenings. It does still have lingering critical love, which was on display during the release of fellow Reitman/Cody/Theron collaboration Tully, its natural companion piece (the definitive piece on the duo is by Alison Willmore for Buzzfeed). But it is notable that Young Adult hasn’t gotten much independent reappraisal outside of the Tully conversation.
Jason Reitman’s career hasn’t exactly given people much motivation to reappraise Young Adult, what with output that can be uncontroversially labeled as an embarrassment or a catastrophe. Even last year’s The Front Runner was largely greeted as a surface-level critique of its subject matter, a far cry from the heavy nuance of Reitman’s character pieces with Cody and Theron. But the work on display here absolutely deserves more credit than the movie has received. Theron has been nominated for three Oscars and won once, in addition to starring in Mad Max: Fury Road, possibly the most acclaimed film of the 2010s. None of this tops her career-best work in Young Adult, which imbues an unambiguously repulsive character with enough sympathy to understand her reckless behavior, without necessarily forgiving her for it. Cody’s work here often seems like a direct response to her success with Juno (and perhaps to the more lukewarm reception of Jennifer’s Body), given the numerous instances of main character Mavis overhearing kitschy teen slang and incorporating it into her low-brow writing.
And it makes sense that Cody would use Young Adult to look back on her prior work, as that is the main undercurrent of Mavis’ character motivation. Her entire mission stems from disappointment at her adult achievements, and looking back to her high school days where not only was she at the height of her powers, but unlimited potential lay ahead of her. But whereas Cody looks back on her early adulthood with a critical eye, Mavis looks back wistfully with a revisionist tint. As Young Adult begins, the Mavis we see has seemingly obtained what high school Mavis likely thought that unlimited potential would get her, only to languish in the realization that all of her accomplishments feel empty, and perhaps she needed to dream bigger, or at least differently.
This all really crystallizes in the film’s last major conversation piece, where Mavis finds herself in the kitchen of former high school classmate, Sandra, right on the edge of seeing the error in her ways. But Sandra, instead of offering healthy advice to cement Mavis’ realization, instead walks Mavis back out onto the ledge, giving her easy comfort and enabling her core delusions. It essentially becomes a conversation between Mavis and her own id - or, in a parallel to Tully, a conversation between Mavis and her high school self who never left her small hometown and never had to face the reality of her adult ambitions.
That key scene is one I’ve kept coming back to over the years, and nowadays I wonder where exactly Mavis would have ended up had that conversation not happened. Would she have bottomed out of her self-destructive spiral and pursued some path of self-betterment? Or would she have collapsed without the motivating energy of her delusions? Because the tragedy of Mavis’s character is that she really is something of a success story - it’s just that success doesn’t always feel like success, sometimes it just feels like getting by. And Mavis is a character where “getting by” just simply isn’t enough.
As far as I’m concerned, “getting by” isn’t enough for Young Adult either. This isn’t a movie that should just sit on the Edgy Comedies row on Netflix, it deserves to be in retrospectives and curated lists. Charlize Theron definitely deserved more than a cursory Golden Globe nomination - not only should she have gotten an Oscar nomination, she probably should have won. Let’s not leave Young Adult to the digital dustbin, it deserves to fulfill its every hope and dream.
