Young Adult | Film review

The last time scion director Jason Reitman joined forces with celebrity gadfly screenwriter Diablo Cody, the results were honest-to-blog insufferable. The most fatal of Juno’s many sins was mistaking its narcissistic, quip-firing heroine for someone worthy of our affection. Young Adult, Reitman and Cody’s encore collaboration, makes no such error in judgment. Its protagonist, a Minneapolis-based wordsmith who ghostwrites a popular tween-lit franchise, is off-putting by design. It’s tempting to read Charlize Theron’s Mavis as Cody’s sly auto-critique—the character is a thirtysomething scenester who earns her keep writing about teenagers—except that only someone with a serious case of self-loathing would paint herself in such a deeply unsympathetic light.

Vaulted into action by an unexpected e-mail, Mavis sets out to win back her college sweetheart, despite the fact that said ex-beau (Patrick Wilson) is now married with a newborn. Reitman nails the culture shock of returning to your hometown after years spent in a big city, while Cody’s script scores some cheap laughs off the curiosities of strip-mall suburbia. (KenTacoHut, anyone?) It saves its true disdain, though, for Mavis herself, a former prom queen whose superiority complex scarcely disguises her desire to be the big fish in a small pond again. Rather than softening the edges of this conceited schemer, Theron buries herself in the ugliness of the part, albeit without Monster-style makeup. It’s a funny and bracingly unsentimental performance.

Against the advice of an old classmate turned drinking buddy (Patton Oswalt, who spikes his sardonic-outcast routine with a dollop of sadness), Mavis follows her amoral plot to its logical conclusion. Far from offering the character a shot at redemption, Young Adult remains perversely committed to her awfulness. Courage of convictions is a sign of maturity in any satirist; Mavis may have a lot of growing up to do, but Cody seems to be coming into her own quite nicely.