The tempting thing to do with this material would be to write a bog-standard Redemption Arc of some kind into it. This story about Mavis, a depressed thirtysomething alcoholic, divorcee and young adult novelist on a doomed quest to recover her lost youth, is courageous enough not to take that out.
That clearly left some viewers, who go into the theater looking for some kind of positivity in the experience, wondering what the "point" is. Well, this isn't a feel good comedy. It doesn't really come to any kind of conventionally "satisfying" conclusion. Mavis begins the movie as an unpleasantly self-centered and deluded character whose life is drowning in addiction, and she largely ends it the same way.
That said, I do think Young Adult brings something genuinely interesting to the table. Mavis is unpleasant, but she's not a villain. Patton Oswalt's supporting turn as a long-crippled nerd from her high school's graduating class is sympathetic: but he's not the spunky sidekick who shows her the way. The mentally-health(ier) townsfolk of Mercury aren't studies in the twin cliches of Small Town Virtue or Small Town Lameness. Everyone is all around just... human.
The story of Young Adult is essentially about the mental breakdown a plainly empty and unhappy Mavis experiences when she discovers her old high school sweetheart has had an infant daughter. It eventually turns out that this represents to her the life she should have had, and might have had but for a miscarriage that ended her relationship with the ever-cheerful and mostly decent Buddy many years ago. She conceives the insane notion of going back to Mercury to reclaim that life, and him... and she has no friends in Minneapolis who can talk her out of this absurd notion.
Throughout the course of the movie, we found out why. Mavis isn't pleasant. She isn't self-aware, she isn't really aware of others, and she's largely lacking in empathy. She doesn't understand how transparent she is to the people she's supposed to be conning, the impossibility of the task she's set herself (she backs away from glimpses of the truth whenever she's in danger of realizing it), and the extent to which so many people in the town are either squicked out or downright alarmed by her bizarre reappearance and are really just humoring her. She doesn't grasp the degree to which Patton Oswalt's Matt (whom she comes to lean on as a kind of confidante) is the only one telling her the truth.
Despite all of that, Theron finds a human and comprehensible core in Mavis. She's not redeemed by her obvious mental scars, but her motives and actions *are* comprehensible. So are everyone else's, and there's nobody in the frame who comes off as sainted or flawless. This kind of simply flawed and human story about mental health and addiction, shorn of the usual tropes of the Redemption Arc, feels like a very different kind of contribution to this conversation. I appreciate it for what it is, and if it's "pointless"... well, maybe that's the point. That's just how a lot of human life as-lived actually feels.
Great performances by Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt. The whole cast is solid, really. If you can withstand its bleakness and accept that it's not going to be a feel-good dramedy, it's worth your time.
That clearly left some viewers, who go into the theater looking for some kind of positivity in the experience, wondering what the "point" is. Well, this isn't a feel good comedy. It doesn't really come to any kind of conventionally "satisfying" conclusion. Mavis begins the movie as an unpleasantly self-centered and deluded character whose life is drowning in addiction, and she largely ends it the same way.
That said, I do think Young Adult brings something genuinely interesting to the table. Mavis is unpleasant, but she's not a villain. Patton Oswalt's supporting turn as a long-crippled nerd from her high school's graduating class is sympathetic: but he's not the spunky sidekick who shows her the way. The mentally-health(ier) townsfolk of Mercury aren't studies in the twin cliches of Small Town Virtue or Small Town Lameness. Everyone is all around just... human.
The story of Young Adult is essentially about the mental breakdown a plainly empty and unhappy Mavis experiences when she discovers her old high school sweetheart has had an infant daughter. It eventually turns out that this represents to her the life she should have had, and might have had but for a miscarriage that ended her relationship with the ever-cheerful and mostly decent Buddy many years ago. She conceives the insane notion of going back to Mercury to reclaim that life, and him... and she has no friends in Minneapolis who can talk her out of this absurd notion.
Throughout the course of the movie, we found out why. Mavis isn't pleasant. She isn't self-aware, she isn't really aware of others, and she's largely lacking in empathy. She doesn't understand how transparent she is to the people she's supposed to be conning, the impossibility of the task she's set herself (she backs away from glimpses of the truth whenever she's in danger of realizing it), and the extent to which so many people in the town are either squicked out or downright alarmed by her bizarre reappearance and are really just humoring her. She doesn't grasp the degree to which Patton Oswalt's Matt (whom she comes to lean on as a kind of confidante) is the only one telling her the truth.
Despite all of that, Theron finds a human and comprehensible core in Mavis. She's not redeemed by her obvious mental scars, but her motives and actions *are* comprehensible. So are everyone else's, and there's nobody in the frame who comes off as sainted or flawless. This kind of simply flawed and human story about mental health and addiction, shorn of the usual tropes of the Redemption Arc, feels like a very different kind of contribution to this conversation. I appreciate it for what it is, and if it's "pointless"... well, maybe that's the point. That's just how a lot of human life as-lived actually feels.
Great performances by Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt. The whole cast is solid, really. If you can withstand its bleakness and accept that it's not going to be a feel-good dramedy, it's worth your time.