Old Yorker

Jason Reitman (2011)

Accepting his BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay for The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius joked that people would think he was an odd choice because the script had no dialogue.  If words were all, Diablo Cody, who won prizes for her first screenplay Juno (2007), would be in the running for more for Young Adult, where she renews her partnership with Jason Reitman.  The film’s protagonist is Mavis Gary, a thirty-seven-year-old divorcee and ghost writer for ‘Waverley Prep’, a series of high-school-set young adult novels which have been a moneyspinner but are now on their last legs.  The movie’s title has an unsurprising double meaning:  Mavis, in spite of her career and many relationships since her failed marriage, hasn’t really grown up since high school.  When she learns that Buddy Slade, her boyfriend from nearly two decades ago, has just become a father, Mavis decides to return from Minneapolis to her home town of Mercury (also in Minnesota) with the aim of wrecking Buddy’s marriage.  Back in Mercury, she finds herself spending less time with him than with another high school contemporary, Matt Freehauf – physically disabled thanks to a bunch of ‘jocks’ who beat him up when he was a teenager because they wrongly assumed he was gay.  Matt acts as Mavis’s confidant and tries to be her conscience too, but to no avail.  Mavis is a smart-talking, self-centred bitch and Diablo Cody can write one-liners to express her personality on tap.  But it’s the defects of her screenplay, which in other respects is smugly unimaginative, that make Young Adult a frustrating film.

Cody is clever:  she exploits the fact that Mavis writes for a living not only to make fun of her but to make a virtue out of her own limitations as a writer.  In a fast food joint, Mavis overhears a conversation between two teenage girls – ‘I said to him:  you’re my moon, my stars – my whole galaxy’.  Fifteen screen minutes later, Mavis is using those very words in a desperate pitch to Buddy.  In an argument between Mavis and Matt, she accuses him of using his disability as a crutch and he derides her clichéd thinking.   But Cody herself can’t go further or deeper than this.   In the loneliness of his workroom, Matt constructs mildly grotesque figures out of ill-assorted parts and makes his own bourbon to deaden the pain of these self-images.  Young Adult‘s emotional climax (of sorts) occurs when Mavis returns from a party for the new baby at the home of Buddy and his wife Beth, where she’s behaved disgracefully and ridiculously.  Her pale silk blouse disfigured by violently-coloured fruit punch, she strips to reveal the falsies which we’ve known, from scene one, she wears, and asks for Matt’s T-shirt.  The differently damaged pair make love.  It would clearly be impossible for Mavis, if she’s to retain any credibility with the audience, to learn the error of her ways and become a better person.  She gets up from her one-nighter with Matt and talks in the kitchen with his sister Sandra.  Until now, Sandra has seemed wan and woebegone but she’s sharp (and discontented) enough to endorse Mavis’s scorn for the ‘hick lakeside town’ of Mercury and to ask if she can go back to ‘the big Minne-apple’ with her.  That’s enough for Mavis to feel vindicated; she leaves town – without Sandra of course – knowing now how to end the final instalment of ‘Waverley Prep’ (she kills off the character based on Buddy).  Cody has it both (or all) ways.  She’s made fun of the people of Mercury, used Mavis’s sharp tongue to do that, subjected her mouthpiece to serial humiliations, and assured us that Mavis is thoroughly messed up but had the right idea all along.  The only consistency in the screenplay is in Diablo Cody’s determination to come out on top.

Young Adult is exasperating rather than despicable, thanks not only to the fluent nastiness of the dialogue but also, and in larger part, to Jason Reitman’s orchestration of the just about impeccable cast.  In the lead, Charlize Theron is a very strong presence:  as a woman, she’s physically imposing; as an actress, she’s precisely and stylishly in control of her body.   The idea that Mavis, although dysfunctional, is enviable makes sense with Theron incarnating her.  And because short, squat Patton Oswalt is physically her polar opposite but matches her in wit, he gives some credibility to the odd coupling of Mavis and Matt.   As the regular guy Buddy, the reliably excellent Patrick Wilson has a finely graded repertoire of smiles – of delight in his wife and baby daughter, of tentative, conscientious friendliness towards Mavis, of unease when she says something disturbing.  She eventually wipes the smiles off his face altogether.  The smaller roles are well played too – by Elizabeth Reaser (Beth), Collette Wolfe (Sandra), Marybeth Hurt (Buddy’s mother), Jill Eikenberry and Richard Bekins (Mavis’s parents).

Mavis Gary, in her scathing contempt for small-town propriety and lack of ambition, is slightly reminiscent of Thora Birch’s Enid in Ghost World – although Enid has found out more about herself in the few months following high school graduation than Mavis appears to have in the best part of twenty years.  Her desire to destroy an old flame’s new relationship calls to mind the plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding but P J Hogan’s movie is both more subtle (the old flame is actually an old friend – whom the protagonist realises she’s in love with only when he’s about to get married) and, thanks to casting, more subversive (since Julia Roberts plays the would-be destroyer of wedded bliss).  It’s a basic problem of Young Adult that, while Mavis may be entertaining, you’re never going to have divided feelings about what she’s doing – you don’t want her to succeed in breaking up Buddy and Beth’s marriage.  This is chiefly because – to the credit of Reitman and the actors – Buddy and Beth are likeable and neither is a fool but this leaves Mavis stranded in absurdity from an early stage.  It’s welcome in principle that crippled Matt is revealed to be not beautiful inside but corroded – yet that too is made immediately clear.  The film’s slippery tone – poised between perverse romantic comedy and acridness – is uncomfortable because of the superficiality rather than the complexity of the screenplay.  The scenes that move the story along are individually entertaining but the whole premise of Young Adult is condescending and artificial.

15 February 2012