Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Diablo Cody

Cast
Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary
Patton Oswalt as Matt Freehauf
Patrick Wilson as Buddy Slade
Elizabeth Reaser as Beth Slade
Collette Wolfe as Sandra Freehauf

Rated R for language and some sexual content

Whether or not, as Henry David Thoreau famously observed, the great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, certainly the great mass of men (and women) lead lives designed as large-scale remakes of their own childhoods.  For most, this means starting a family of their own and, like many a reboot, casting the children from the original as the parents in what otherwise ends up being a carbon copy for a few more swear words and the kids showing a little more skin than the first time out.  For the rest, it means an adulthood of arrested development, watching the life everyone tells them they’re supposed to be living from the sidelines across that same gulf of mutual misunderstanding W.G. Sebald said separates man from animals.  For these people, life is often an endless sequel, covering the same ground year after year to diminishing returns.  Or at least that’s how it all looks through the prism of depression, the subject of Young Adult, a daring new dramedy from Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, who performed the same directing and writing chores on Juno, a movie that could not be more dissimilar in tone.  Young Adult’s got some laughs, but they’re mostly of the horrified, uncomfortable variety as we watch depressed, delusional Mavis Gary (a stunning and brave Charlize Theron) make a desperate attempt to recapture her lost adolescence.  Sporting an equally gutsy breakout performance by Patton Oswalt, Young Adult is an emotionally rich black comedy of ennui, shattered dreams, and the way the pretty and ugly alike are left by the side of life’s parade if they can’t keep up.

Author Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a wreck:  selfish, self-absorbed and still chugging soda from two-liter bottles in her late 30’s.  One morning, she receives an e-mail from her old flame Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) announcing the birth of his child with his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser).  This pings something dark and deep in Mavis, who needs to deliver the new book in the young adult series she more or less ghostwrites for the famous author who created it (her name IS listed inside the covers).  But instead of hunkering down and working, she takes her laptop and her little dog on the road to her hometown.  Once there, she claims to be taking care of “some real estate”, but she’s really in town to win back Buddy.  Not so slowly and not so surely, she throws herself at him while he seems oblivious.  In between salvos, Marvis runs into Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) at a bar.  Famous in his youth for a savage beating by a group of jocks who thought he was gay, he’s still walking with braces and not quite fully functional, you know, down there, and has retreated into a life of random hobbies like home brewing beer and customizing action figures.  The house he shares with his Mavis-worshipping sister Sandra (Collette Wolfe) becomes her refuge, at least when she’s not at the motel or eating three meals a day at the KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut combo restaurant she calls “KenTacoHut”.  Matt knows her plan is crazy, but even he is blinded by the worn and ravaged beauty that still outshines everyone else in town:  sure, she pulls hairs out of her head from time to time, has all kinds of substance abuse problems and is clearly running from more than one secret, but how could a girl who looks like Mavis Gary be mentally ill?

Theron is often cited with derision as an actress who “ugglies herself up” for dramatic roles (such as her Oscar-winning turn in Monster), but what’s going on here is something else altogether.  Mavis is gorgeous, no matter how drunk, makeup-free or perpetually scowling she might be, and while that clearly carried her effortlessly through high school, it’s become her albatross as an adult.  Something happened to her shortly after graduation that she’s never gotten over, and now even her sanctuary of hiding out in the fictional high school she writes about is coming to an end, and she is unraveling before everyone’s eyes.  But, truth be told, as much as we forgive a lot from the attractive, we never consider them troubled:  a pretty person with problems is a bad person to society at large, and Mavis is a pretty awful woman.  But Theron invests her with such empathetic heft and relentless need to reclaim the specialness that seemed to be her birthright that I couldn’t help but feel for her.

On the other end of society’s spectrum is Matt, played with shocking vulnerability by Oswalt as the movie delves into notions of body image and what it means to be The Nerd that few movies dare to play for anything but laughs.  There’s a scene late in the game where Mavis and Matt face each other nearly naked, then actually look each other in the eye that is so heartbreakingly well-acted it approaches perfection.  While it’s the lot of the world’s Mavises to forever run after something that’s behind them, it’s for the Matts to simply stand still, watching from their corner booth as people like Buddy can’t be bothered to remember the part of the story where he wasn’t actually gay.  At the end of the day, the only people who will ever help Mavis or Matt are themselves, and Young Adult isn’t exactly flush with optimism on either front.

Wilson is interesting casting as Buddy because the role clarified something for me about his screen persona.  He’s generally best as bad guys, as his very, very delightfully bad villain in The A-Team exemplified, or as seriously complex heroes, as in Watchmen.  But he comes off as very self-contained when trying to be straight nice guys, I rarely have empathy for him in roles he plays straight.  And here, that’s just right, because I don’t honestly know what we’re supposed to make of Buddy, who’s got his own thing going on and tries to be nice to Mavis, but only within certain limits.  Reaser is very effective as his more empathetic wife, who in turn inspires questions about whether there’s much of anything a person can do to help someone who’s genuinely troubled and doesn’t seem to want it.

Cody is assembling a formidable body of screenwriting work three movies in:  even the trainwreckish Jennifer’s Body is bursting at the seams with fascinating ideas.  And here she’s not just able to get laughs with extreme characters, but also to really plum the darkest parts of what it means to suffer in silence in the grown-up world.  Reitman previously directed Up in the Air, a less focused meditation on some of the same issues, and a movie I probably wouldn’t have liked as much as I did had I seen Young Adult first.  But while Air occasionally blinked and pandered, Adult is a stone cold black comic tragedy, and it sticks to its guns clear through to the end.  This is the kind of movie that only ever gets made with powerful creative people and popular stars behind it pushing, and I’m really glad they did.

As you can tell from all the philosophizing, Young Adult is a movie designed to push people’s buttons.  Perhaps those who are more like Mavis will find her to be a misunderstood heroine while those tormented by high school Mean Girls might find no sympathy for her at all.  This is a gutsy movie precisely because it’s about a woman:  guys have been allowed to be boozy train wrecks with some redeeming feature hidden so far inside we can’t see it for years.  But is Mavis Gary really anything but the endless echo of a long-ago homecoming dance?  That’s for the future to tell.