MOVIES IN REVIEW: YOUNG ADULT
My Therona
The third best kind of movie is the kind that you see and have fun in and forget immediately after (The Artist). The second best kind of movie is the kind with enough layers, working on enough different levels that it keeps your mind occupied and you thinking about it afterwards. The first best kind of movie is the kind that completely engages you on a level of pure enjoyment while you are watching it but whose different sides and interpretations only sneak up later and grow the more you think back on it.
Young Adult is the first best kind of movie, one whose characters are so engaging and fun to watch that you just sort of take it in while you’re there but the depth and power of which take hold and grow inside you like some sort of stomach fungus in the days after.
I have said before and I will say it again, if there were any justice in the Academy Awards the best Actress race would be a two woman contest between Charlize Theron for this and Kirsten Dunst for Melancholia. All other actresses with any dignity would refuse to enter the ring with either of these giants. Charlize’s performance in this film is the most fearless and subtle acting you’ll see anytime soon. She takes what might have been in lesser hands a very broad cardboard cut out of a trash talking oblivious megabitch, and turned her into a woman with real pathos, teetering on the edge.
This movie is the story of my generation. For so many of my fellow X’ers, the high school/college years froze us in time and have driven millions of us to madness trying to recapture that lost moment. For us, the pre-grunge and grunge eras were a time of magic nihilism, when the old order had fallen away, when the future was something dark hovering in a corner that you avoided seeing while the other shoes still hadn’t dropped. It was a time when a generation of latchkey children grew up and momentarily ran away with the circus. It’s what John Hughes who was making films about Gen X during Gen X got right (as much as I never would have admitted that at the time) in the Breakfast Club when he portrayed us as living a depressive colony on some remote unsupervised space station, the adults having become sad jokes whose authority they had squandered in key parties and jogging suits, and what he got wrong in every other one of his films when he tried to depict us as 50’s teenyboppers in thrift store clothings. (For more on the era, I refer you to my thrilling )
For Charlize’s Mavis it was a time to rule unquestioned, and the movie hints at the dark side of that moment. For Patton Oswalt’s character, it was a time to be on the business end of the Lord of the Flies. For both, the memories have been seared into their consciousnesses so deeply that both are completely paralyzed by the past. They meet two decades later frozen on opposite ends of the divide, wallowing in their respective stunted worlds of cassette mix tapes and hand-painted D & D miniatures. In between are those bizarre, generational traitors who managed to move forward, it is suggested here, by having minds so blank they aren’t capable of emotional memories stretching back more than a few hours.
Which is what makes Charlize and Patton’s characters so engaging despite their “likability” issues. They are clearly miles smarter than anyone around them and feel their circumstances more than anyone around them. But those smarts and emotions only bind them tighter to that era lost in the mist and all its promises and betrayals.
Young Adult is the perfect title for a film about my people, and probably as good a survey of the wreckage of the X Generation as we will ever find.
Folks can say what they will about Jason Reitman’s public persona. He is shaping up as an incredibly sensitive director of very rich character pieces. His films may not be for everyone (although I don’t see why they aren’t) but there is no denying that every time he is peers deep into conflicted characters, struggling to understand them in ways that move past the cliches of film and of psychological shorthands. He is a real filmmaker. Diablo Cody for her part has written a script completely free of pop-speak that as Patton said in my : “The script was so complicated and so nuanced. It isn’t even a walk across a tightrope. It’s a drunken run across a tightrope.” This is a beautiful script, that one touch less sensitively handled could have so easily stumbled into cheap comedy or cliche but avoids all the pitfalls and comes out a major hilarious and horrifying drama.
The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: See it at least twice. 9 stars out of 10.
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