Young Adult stomps on middle-class, ambitionless America

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      Starring Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, and Patrick Wilson. Rated PG.

      It turns out a serial killer isn’t the most terrible person Charlize Theron has ever played. Now, thanks to the perfectly poisonous pen of screenwriter Diablo Cody, we have Young Adult, the dark, demented anti-Juno. Not only is there nothing quirky, cutesy, kooky, or kitty about this film, homeskillet, but Theron plays a deluded, disappointed woman-child who pursues what she wants like a panzer—that is, if a panzer ran on Maker’s Mark and giant bottles of Diet Coke.

      Mavis (Theron) is a divorcée who lives in a sterile Minneapolis high-rise, ghostwrites a declining young-adult book series, gets blotto, and gets laid, like, whenever. When Mavis learns that her now-married high-school beau, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), has a new baby, it’s an adrenaline shot to the heart that’s barely beating beneath her Hello Kitty T-shirt. Mavis beelines for the tiny, “gross” town of her youth to rescue Buddy from his clearly totally heinous existence and reclaim him. Sublimely reprehensible behaviour ensues.

      There are no chickenshits involved in this film, kids. That includes director Jason Reitman (Juno), who obviously seriously dug Cody’s gutsy, funny, no-hugging, no-redemption script and didn’t mind stomping on, oh, most of middle-class, ambitionless America. Compared to the strip-mall–happy folks who never left town, “psychotic prom-queen bitch” Mavis (as a former classmate calls her) is a success.

      Despite Mavis’s emotionally stunted teen brain—recollect your own fantastically cracked high-school wavelength and then remove all conscience—you, strangely, feel for her. Theron, still looking like a supermodel (damn), is wildly fearless, pulling off some horrifically discomfiting scenes. But Young Adult’s other secret weapon is Patton Oswalt as Matt, another former classmate, crippled after a beating by jocks way back when (“You’re the hate-crime guy!” Mavis says) and going nowhere slow. The two become confidantes (with some pretty raw, heart-punching conversations), and the weird pairing somehow makes Monster Mavis more human. Okay, almost.


      Watch the trailer for Young Adult.

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