Young Adult’s Skewed “Protagonist” Fails at the End

Young Adult Poster

I’m not really an indie film fan, but every now and then, I will check out an indie movie that I’ve heard good things about or for whatever reason just happens to catch me eye and look intriguing.  Such was the case a little while ago when I decided to rent the movie Young Adult, starring Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, after hearing some great reviews about it from NPR and the Los Angeles Times.

In short, Young Adult is a movie about the “post-post college letdown,” and what I mean by that is that it isn’t about someone experiencing the hardships of life in their mid-20s, shortly after leaving college and entering the “real world”; it’s about someone who’s really having a sort of third-life crisis (or whatever the percentage) as she is hitting her early 30s.  By all means Theron’s character, Mavis, has achieved at least a moderate level of success as a teenage novel ghost writer, but she finds that she is not entirely happy, even though she truly believes that she is awesome and all of her instincts (which we later find to be rather skewed) tell her that she should be.

Well, long story shot, Mavis travels to her home in small-town Minnesota to try to win back (or just have an affair, I’m not sure of the actual goal) her former high school boyfriend who happens to be married and expecting a child.  A few of the other characters in the film see what Mavis is doing and continually try to tell her how crazy she is (but not her ex-boyfriend or his wife…). Most notably, Patton Oswalt’s character, Matt (the former high school nerd who was beat to a cripple because jocks thought he was gay), keeps trying to pull Mavis back from this ledge of delusion.  Because of this, they begin a strange friendship that is half-friendship, half her ridiculing him for being pathetic (have I mentioned that she is an awful person?).

“Hi, I’m the straight guy who got beat into a cripple because jerks thought I was gay. You were the homecoming queen, right? Well, I may not be able to walk without a cane, but you’re still awful person…”

I have a few issues with this film.  First of all, Mavis’ ex-boyfriend and his wife seem to make the strangest, most unnatural decisions regarding Mavis.  Now, I’m married, and I can’t in a thousand years imagine my wife allowing me to hang out with a serious ex-girlfriend in one-on-one situations such as dinner or drinks.  Yet in Young Adult, this happens continually.  At one point, the ex-boyfriend’s wife actually invites Mavis to her baby shower, even though she hardly knows her.  I just don’t see this sort of thing happening in real life.  People in real life are neither this dumb nor this nice.

But the biggest complaint I have with this film is during the penultimate scene after Theron’s Mavis makes a huge fool of herself in front of her ex, his wife, and pretty much the whole neighborhood.  In her drunken embarrassment, she stays the night with Matt and his sister (yes, they still live together).  At this point you would think she has learned her lesson, that she isn’t better than everyone in her hometown like she insisted that she was.  That she is no better off, no happier.  In fact, the film leads us to believe that in many ways, she is worse off than her peers, that she is less happy.

It looks like the film is about to tidy up with a poignant lesson about happiness… until the writer, Diablo Cody, throws all that out the window with a conversation between Mavis and Matt’s sister who idolized (and still does for some reason) Mavis while in high school.  Mavis is a half-step away from realizing that being the “it girl” 15 years ago isn’t the key to happiness and that she isn’t better than everyone in her hometown just because she is pretty and moved to Minneapolis to become a published writer; however, Matt’s sister tells her how awesome she still is and how she can just tell everyone else to just “F off” because she is Mavis Gary and she left small town Minnesota behind.  She says everyone else is a loser and all wish that they could be Mavis.  So Mavis feels better and drives home unchanged.  The end.

“Yeah, forget all the losers around here! It’s not like you just made yourself out to be a completely insane b#!&$ in front of the entire town or anything… Oh… well, you’re still awesome in my book, so don’t ever change!”

The problem is that that is not true and it’s not good story-telling.  At the end of Young Adult, Theron’s Mavis is the exact same character that she was at the beginning, which is a pretty awful, selfish, somewhat delusional woman.  The audience doesn’t like her, and she even has to be convinced that she likes herself.  To me it felt like Diablo Cody wrote that scene just for herself, as if given all her successes (and failures. See Jennifer’s Body), as a writer in Hollywood she still isn’t happy and she can’t explain why.  But she this that she should be happy and she is better than all the chumps she left behind in the town she came from.  “So F those guys!”

Now, I don’t really know Diablo Cody or where she comes from, but the ending of Young Adult was so jarring that it just felt like it was forced upon us trying to make us believe that there is some truth in it.  But it’s not true.  And anyone who knows true happiness knows that it has nothing to do with being popular, successful, rich, famous, or pretty.  And it certainly has nothing to do with convincing yourself that you are better than everyone else that you know.