theron, adding another piece of work to her resume.
the last time wunderkind director jason reitman hooked up with stripper-turned-screenwriter diablo cody, the offspring was juno — that wildly-popular hipster dramedy partially responsible for boosted sales of hamburger phones, michael cera damning himself to eternal typecasting hell, and jason reitman’s only real dalliance with sickly-sweet sentiment to date. no doubt there’s still a certain degree of guilty pleasure to be had watching juno spice up the recipe with cody’s acerbic quips, but as their latest reunion effort shows, consciously avoiding cutesy resolutions or precious, surface-level quirk eventually breeds a more lasting work.
young adult is defiantly un-sentimental comedy, perhaps even quite darkly so if you squint past the fluffy pocket-pooches and pink sweatpants. its conceit — a slobby grown-up that never quite graduated high-school psychologically — is as weary a premise as any, yet refreshingly cody isn’t particularly interested in life lessons or coming-of-age chestnuts. young adult instead walks a fine line between awkward black comedy and bleak, bruising character study and it’s a firm attestation to what both creatives do best that the film can tally both bitter laughs and nuanced observation without succumbing to the pressures of its formula, even when you feel like it might just have to in order to retain any worth.
there’s some genuine insight wrapped up in charlize theron’s full-bitch-mode turn as the unscrupulous, acid-tongued subject mavis gary; a failing teen-fiction author, returning to her hometown in an unbending attempt at re-snagging her now-married-with-a-kid high school boyfriend (the ever-underrated patrick wilson). however, the laughs are of a notably different breed here; still dependent on a sharply-penned bite, but ringing less of the rehearsed one-liner-laden wordplay cody is renowned for, and of something distinctively darker and more true. once the unwieldy finale arrives, it does so with painful tautness; yet still files a tough humor out of what would, in any other film, be a purely punishing public meltdown.
it’s in this comedic stoniness that reitman finds voice for the cultural commentary so brilliantly exercised in his work bookending juno. eschewing the easy target of simple blonde vapidity in his skewering of consumer culture, reitman instead evokes a broader ubiquity of shallow superficiality; an omnipresent glaze of hair extensions, kendra re-runs and associated cultural oddities. as mavis will show, intelligence isn’t the issue; rather, disillusion is, and mavis’s deluded quest appears as much a product of sociocultural conditioning as it does of any inherent malice. like a taxi driver for the kardashian generation, young adult is as equally fascinated with environment as it with its sociopath product, though understandably, most will probably be too glued to theron’s second monsterpiece of a performance to notice.
trailer here.
