Go see it for the Dog!

Young Adult

The tag line for this ‘comedy’ is: “Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.” It neatly sums up this Jason Reitman film but it is also the film’s weakness: the characters may not have grown up but the audience has.

This is not the first outing for the duo of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody. The two combined successfully to create the comedy Juno that tackled the issue of teen pregnancy and not growing up too quickly. More recently he directed current Oscar favourite George Clooney in the adult romance Up in the Air. While both these films are fun and engaging, watching them back on DVD I started questioning why I had enjoyed them so much to start with. The problem was the pacing: at the cinema, hostage to my $15 ticket and captive in my seat, I was willing to ride out some boredom for a decent film. In the comfort of my own home I just wanted to hit fast forward. Unfortunately, this time I was hostage to my $15 ticket and in a packed cinema: with Young Adult there was no escape!

Young Adult is about ghost writer Mavis Gary, played by perennial Oscar favourite Charlize Theron. Mavis is an alcoholic, Diet Coke guzzling, reality TV junky, struggling to finish the last of an increasingly unpopular series of Young Adult (YA) novels. Upon receiving an email from an ex-boyfriend, she decides to return home and try and win him back. Already the shallowness of the plot was starting to worry me: at least Juno had a baby and was experiencing real problems. Instead, we follow Mavis as she checks into a hotel with dog in tow and goes about winning back her high school boyfriend from his wife and newly born baby.

For the next hour and a half the audience is subjected to the shameless flirting of Mavis that is both pathetic and lacks any of the promised comedy. In fact, the dog doesn’t have any lines but elicited more laughs in the cinema than any of the characters. Moreover, the plot fails to develop past these threadbare premises until right on cue, the third act begins with the obvious message of the film in the clichéd drunken excursion to the woods: you need to move on from the past and grow up.

And this is the heart of this film’s failure: Diablo Cody forgot that the audience of Young Adult were in fact adults and that they could handle something a little more complicated. One of the reviews claims this is “Juno’s wicked older sister” but at least Juno had something important to say about life, whereas Mavis only exists between alcohol fuelled day dreams of high school romance. Moreover, she is encouraged in these hedonistic and apathetic pursuits by one of the minor character who states that the small town folk are “nothing” and that “they may as well die” thus absolving her of guilt for wanting to wreck a happy marriage and validating her empty life.

I don’t know what happened in the script writing process that this occurred or whether Reitman just couldn’t be bothered bringing some sense to this story. The entire film instead validates the existence of the small town folk as fulfilled and enjoying their lives while the big city star is the one who wants for rewarding relationships and purpose. Then maybe again I’m reading too much into the film. Or perhaps that was the point all along and I was too annoyed at wasting my money on it to see that. Either way, someone screwed the pooch on this one.