Review No.38: Young Adult

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to a free preview screening of Young Adult however due to complications involving times, dates and life in general this had to be cancelled. Thankfully today the internet fairies have blessed me with a copy and I can finally see the new film from Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody who directed and wrote Juno respectively. One of the criticisms of Cody's Oscar winning screenplay for Juno was that her writing for the teenage characters felt like somebody of her age imaging how teens would speak. In response to that the lead in this film, Charlize Theron's Mavis Gary, is a grown-up who writes as a teenage girl as she produces a set of novels that are classed in the young adult range. When we first meet Mavis she is struggling to complete the last in the popular Waverly Prep series for which she writes when she suddenly receives an e-mail from an old flame about his wife having a baby. From this she decides to return to her old hometown of Mercury a backwater suburb where the majority of her old schoolmates still live and in which she hopes to rekindle her old boyfriend Buddy's feelings for her despite him being a new dad. She also strikes up an unlikely friendship with another former schoolmate Matt who, by his own admission, is a fat nerd and who suffered a traumatic experience during high school.

I think for the most part Cody gets everything about Young Adult right with Mavis being a character who is stuck in a state of arrested development and despite being successful and once married to a charming man she still hankers for her old school life where she was the Prom Queen. Charlize Theron gives what is, for me personally, her best performance playing a character who is essentially a bitch but giving her some sort of heart and reason for behaving the way she is. Theron also bounces well off Patton Oswalt who gives a good accounting of himself as Matt the only person privy to Mavis' plan to win back her former love. Patrick Wilson is also fairly solid in his role as Buddy you can believe that he once was a popular high school jock but has decided to settle down with his wife Beth. The whole smalltown of Mercury is very well drawn and I felt a sense of an old town that had tried to be modernised and was still inhabited by the same people that were there twenty years ago only now they all have kids. As you can imagine this being a film from the creators of Juno there is also a lot of emphasis on the soundtrack and how music can evoke certain emotions. As Mavis is obssessed with her high school years there is a lot of 1990s music from the likes of Dinosaur Jr. and 4 Non Blondes however it is Teenage Fanclub's The Concept that is the song that you will be humming after the film has finished. The main problem is I feel that Cody and Reitman didn't know how particularly to finish the film so after the 'big incident' things go off a bit with Mavis' ultimate decision being left in the hands of someone that I feel she would've paid little attention to. Apart from the ending though I really enjoyed this film with two strong central performances, a great setting and an awesome soundtrack.

Overall: A well-written and well-acted comedy which dips a bit at the end yet features Charlize Theron's best performance very gets  8.5/10