Guys like me are born loving girls like you.
This was not my pick of a movie, although that's not to say I would never have decided to see it on my own. It was a decent movie, and I had a great time going to see it: this was my first trip to the Cedar-Lee theater here in Cleveland Heights, and it turned out to be free! There was some week-long Key Bank propaganda thing going on, and I guess they'd been doing give-aways all over town. That night, we all got free tickets and free popcorn, although the event hadn't been publicized (the staff said they'd only found out a few hours earlier), so there wasn't really a crowd. So that (and a couple of pre-film cocktails) put me in a good mood before the movie even got rolling.
This all happened a few weeks ago, so I might not have these details all correct, but here goes. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a professional novelist living in the "big city" of Minneapolis. She is not satisfied with her life; she is part of a team of writers producing young adult pulp under common pseudonym. When she finds out that her high-school boyfriend Buddy Slade (an excellent name for a character, played by Patrick Wilson) and his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) are having a baby, she decides to head back to stalk him and try to break up their marriage. She runs into another high-school classmate Matt (Patton Oswalt) at the bar, and they slowly hit it off. Matt was not popular in high school, and is remembered for being severely beaten in high school by homophobes who thought he was gay. As a result, he's had to walk on crutches his entire life. That very interesting, dark, component to his character is one of the details that makes Young Adult interesting. I've never seen a character like that before, and it's such a significant detail of his character, very visible because of the fact that he's always using crutches, and yet it doesn't really become a central part of the story.
I think that may be intentional, since the real point of the movie seems to be showing us what a completely self-centered asshat Mavis is. I was reminded of The Graduate, in the way that during the movie you start off rooting for Mavis, who's the protagonist after all, but by the end of the movie you realize that she's just a crazy, alcoholic, narcissist. The medium of film almost, just almost, makes you not realize that their actions are totally unacceptable. Just when we think she may be about to have a breakthrough, she has a pseudo-epiphany (aided by Matt's sister, played excellently by Collette Wolf), which brings her back to her original point of view. In fact (according to my notes) Mavis even quotes The Graduate in the movie, interpreting its message as "love conquers all." I think that says enough about her character.
With Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, and Patrick Wilson, this could be considered a pretty good cast. I've really started to like Patrick Wilson after seeing him first in Hard Candy, then The Watchmen, and Little Children. He seems to end up playing characters who are part-boring, part-interesting (of course, superhero+alter-ego is the clearest example, but suburban-dwelling housedad who dreams of riding skateboards also fits). I don't really like Charlize Theron, but I don't dislike her. I think Ciderhouse Rules is her only movie that I really enjoyed. She was good in The Road, but had little screen time and less dialogue. Patton Oswalt is getting some interesting, dark-comedy roles lately (see this movie, plus Big Fan), but I'm not really on the Patton Oswalt bandwagon. I thought Collette Wolfe was great in her role. Looking on IMDB I think the only other movie I've seen her in was Hot Tub Time Machine; she played John Cusack's sister and was forgettable.
I think in the end, Young Adult is a good movie, but not my movie. It's enjoyable, and there's plenty going on to keep the audience entertained. I really loved an early scene where Mavis packs up and leaves her Minneapolis apartment. It's a scene we've seen many times before: the morning after a one-night stand, the guy wakes up and tries to sneak out without waking up the girl. In Young Adult, not only do we have the girl sneaking out on the guy, she's sneaking out of her own apartment. She gets out of bed, grabs some clothes and her dog, then gets in her car for a roadtrip, leaving some rando dude still sleeping in her bed. It's a great inversion of a standard trope. That kind of thing, plus various film references (e.g. The Graduate references mentioned above, or the fact that Matt's home-distilled whiskey is named "Mos Eisley") make Young Adult fun to watch, but it's another movie with unlikeable characters, and it's not exactly a gripping story. It avoids being predictable, but that doesn't really matter much if you don't care how the movie ends.
On an unrelated note, before the film we saw previews for Albert Nobbs, where Glenn Close plays a woman passing as a man in early 1900s England (I think). Is it weird to say her character looks more than a little like Mrs. Doubtfire? Maybe it's just the excessive makeup and kind of stretched-looking face. Anyway that looks to be an interesting movie I hope I see.
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