Young Adult (MA15+) Director: Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) Starring: Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson, Patton Oswalt (above), Elizabeth Reaser. Verdict: Effortlessly reaching full immaturity. Stars: * *
FILE this one under “great talents wasted”.
Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody reunite to recapture some of the skewed and shrewd magic of their hit Juno.
Charlize Theron turns herself inside out to play a role as against type as her Oscar-winning display in Monster.
Stand-up comic Patton Oswalt chimes in with a performance so finely rendered it makes you wish his character was the subject of the picture.
And yet, Young Adult never grows up enough to get over the kooky novelty of its premise.
It is a movie so impressed with its own pitch – hey folks, come and watch classy Charlize be all slobby and slutty! – that it doesn’t bother crafting any kind of worthwhile follow-through.
Back to the reteaming of Reitman and Cody. The big mistake they have made is over-estimating the appeal and sophistication of the material they are working with.
To put it bluntly, Juno worked wonders because it was primarily a work of social satire, cleverly highlighting the moral hypocrisies endured by a young single mother-to-be.
Young Adult is a work of anti-social satire whose featured character is an amoral hypocrite. End of story.
Theron plays Mavis, a boozy, bitchy writer in her late 30s who returns to her small town to “rescue” her teenage sweetheart (Patrick Wilson) from a happy marriage and settled home life.
Mavis is so delusionally self-obsessed – and casually self-destructive – the errors of her ways simply never occur to her. Young Adult wrings every gag it can from the misanthropy of Mavis. A sizeable number, in fact. The pity is not many are all that amusing.
The sharpest and best lines in the picture go to Oswalt, playing a crippled former classmate of Mavis who knows exactly what she is up to.
While Theron’s abrasively unlikeable performance cannot be faulted, the film surrounding it is fundamentally flawed from the get-go.
Though there are some fine individual scenes, the one-note story told here never satisfies, nor engages.
