After Patton Oswalt's amazing performance in Robert Siegel's brilliant Big Fan, he deserves to see more serious, complex roles come his way. His performance as an obsessed fan, existing for his team in Big Fan and his performance here as a broken man, isolated and damaged from a vicious attack years prior, are even more impressive if you've heard his stand-up or otherwise know his personality. Oswalt, as Matt, is gold. Unfortunately, Oswalt and Charlize Theron were the only redeeming qualities of the Diablo Cody-scripted, Jason Reitman-directed train wreck that was Young Adult.
It had potential, and started off strong. Mavis, a 38-year-old author of a young adult series of novels, is having writers' block due to a lack of motivation (the series has been canceled, so this is the last installment), an alcohol problem, and a fixation on the news that her ex-boyfriend (Patrick Wilson, Little Children) and his wife have a new baby. After an online date (and subsequent one-night stand) doesn't erase Buddy and his baby from her mind, she hops in her car and leaves Minneapolis for her hometown, the fictitious Mercury, Minnesota. (Snippets of Mercury in the film were actually shot in my hometown, St. Michael, Minnesota.)
On the way, Mavis (really, "Mavis"? Who after 1935 has named their child Mavis? Is Cody picking on Minnesota here for being behind the times?) listens to an old mix tape and immerses herself in the memories of being Buddy's girl. The film does an intense job of building Mavis's complexity. She suffers from trichotillomania, which, like all body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), is mysterious and misunderstood (like Mavis, perhaps?) She's delusional; she's divorced (we don't know quite why). She's got a drinking problem, and a dog she only occasionally notices.
There could have been any number of ways Cody could have chosen to explain what has caused the slide and eventual all-out meltdown (one of the most unbelievable while terribly uncomfortable meltdowns in film, which, I guess, is praise), but instead, Cody chose the most tired, most predictable, most simplifying reason for Mavis's instability, completely derailing any complexity she'd built up in Mavis's characterization.
Mavis reveals publicly that she'd had a miscarriage when she was 20. We get it now: she lost Buddy's child, and now he is married to someone else, someone who was able to birth his child. Perhaps she feels miscarrying Buddy's child is the reason she lost him (it's not explained). But clearly, her childlessness is the reason why she fixated on Buddy and his baby.
After Mavis's meltdown, she borders on epiphany. Matt's sister, Sandra, watches in fear as Mavis, bedraggled and in the wine-stained dress from the night before, opens up, shares her fears that she might be a loser, no better than the halfwits who stayed behind in Mercury. There is a glimmer of something when we see Mavis walk the fence between illness and redemption, delusion and comprehension, but it is dashed by Sandra, who tells Mavis that she is better than everyone else, that she is special. Sandra seems to be doing this for her own sake, not Mavis's (she seems to need the myth of Mavis, plus, she thinks they're actually pals now). The effect is startling: Mavis returns to her previous state, presumably as she was before she received the emailed photo of Buddy's baby.
Whether Cody is using Mavis to tell her own hometown of Lemont, IL how she feels about it or whether Cody is telling the audience that we share culpability for other people's abhorrent behavior by allowing, even encouraging it, is unclear, but the effect is substantial. We don't get the happy ending we want; we don't get the chance to actually start liking the character we've spent an hour and a half merely tolerating. We don't even get a proper goodbye to Matt, the only character we do care about. Cody and Reitman deserve some praise for that unexpected, nonredemptive (although ultimately unsatisfying) ending.
Still, it's disappointing the way Young Adult squandered Mavis's potential as a flawed, complex female character by turning her into a stereotype. You can't turn on the TV without surfing past shows and movies in which the female characters feel they are lacking in their lives because they don't have children. Or because their mothers failed them in some way. Or because they don't have a man. Or because their careers aren't satisfying enough. For Mavis, it seems to be all of the above.
For the writer of Juno and Candy Girl, a woman we would think could understand the complexity of human females, to fall back on such a tired and predictable trope is frustrating. Diablo Cody, you're better than that.
(If all of these downfalls were Reitman's, accept my apology, DC).
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