Sunday, September 30, 2012
Young Adult (2011)
IMDb plot summary: Soon after her divorce, a fiction writer returns to her home in small-town Minnesota, looking to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend, who is now happily married and has a newborn daughter.
Directed by Jason Reitman. Stars Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, and Patrick Wilson.
In the first ten minutes of this movie, I told my friend who was watching it with me, "If this turns out to be a movie about how she has to go back to her small hometown and have a baby to be happy, I'm going to be annoyed." I could not have been more wrong. Young Adult takes all the romantic comedy tropes I hate most and turns them upside down, creating a much, much more interesting movie than I had expected. Charlize Theron does an excellent job playing the unbelievably self-centered, shallow popular girl and, even more fun, she never learns the error of her ways. She returns to her hometown just as shallow as ever, having learned only that people back home are jealous of her, and she is content with that knowledge to reform her life, now that she has confirmation that it is an awesome one. This movie is an excellent drama about a fascinating character, but it also made me laugh too - well done again, Jason Reitman! 4 stars.
Best Part: How every time I thought I knew where the story was going, something else happened.
Worst Part: You know, I'm sure there were moments, but nothing's really coming to mind right now. It all hangs together very nicely.
Flickchart: #220, below I'm Not Scared and above The Village.
Musical Theater Person Sighting: That, of course, is Patrick Wilson as Buddy.
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1 comment:
Hmm. I read the film very differently. She's defined herself as a fish too big for the small pond of her hometown. She's discovered that she's not such a big fish in the bigger pond of New York, and worse yet: she discovers she's not even a big fish at home.
The only one who will even give her the time of day is Patton Oswald, and he makes it clear that he enjoys that she's been "brought down" to socializing with him.
There's the scene in the book store, where she's told she's not to autograph any of the books so that they can still be returned for a partial refund. That's how little she matters.
There are two ways of reading the end. One is that she's some kind of Mary Tyler Moore character, driven by unfailing resolve that tomorrow will be better than today. The other is that she's gone so far down the rabbit hole with self-delusion as a self-defense mechanism that she cannot properly process the lesson in humility of the film. The latter is how I saw it.
It was kind of peculiar for me to watch the film when I did. I checked it out on Blu-ray from Redbox around the time I finished working on the first draft of my novel. It's about a guy who has just submitted his first novel to a publisher and goes back home for a 15 year class reunion. I had no idea what Young Adult was even about at the time; I knew only that it was directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody.
Our stories are very different (mine is heavily autobiographical), but there were some thematic similarities that I found intriguing. I think they're more inherent to the premise than anything else, but it was weird all the same.
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