19/05/12……….’Darkly, hilarious’ Young Adult at Thame Cinema
THAME CINEMA 4 ALL, Nelson street, Thame – Saturday, May 19, 2012l; Young Adult – USA 2011, 93 minutes, 15 certificate, Directed by Jason Reitman, Starring Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt.
You know the score… jaded 30 something, cynical and slightly let down by life… returns ?Home? to the warm reassurance of her childhood haunts, indulging in the sweet nostalgia of first loves and Mom?s home cooking. In so doing, she learns some valuable lessons about common decency and remaining true to her roots and that home-is-best and we all feel warm inside… blah, blah, blah. This is not that film. In fact, this is a darkly hilarious antidote to that film, from the director and writer of the wonderful Juno.
Charlize Theron is divorced, depressed, functioning alcoholic, former prom queen Mavis, until recently a writer of ? you guessed ? a successful series of teen high school novels. Learning that Buddy, her high-school squeeze, has just become a father, she decides to go home to tempt him away from his sorry life of suburban compromise and to prove that she still has ?it?. Along the way, she teams up with a former classmate Matt, someone violently bullied in high school, the kind of kid Mavis was once contemptuous of but who now might prove useful.
Her self-styled triumphant return to relive the glory days of her youthful allure goes, needless to say, from bad to worse: Mavis? initial sneering superiority gives way by degrees to mortal embarrassment and pathetic tragedy. It seems ultimately that she is the one who hasn?t managed to grow up. She has failed to grasp that real life is not just high school with money and that the power afforded by teenage beauty wears thin as the years pass.
Theron is brilliant as probably the least sympathetic movie heroine imaginable ? narcissistic, petulant, cruel, deluded, but kind of bleakly fabulous too. And Cody?s script is acerbic, incisive and witty, a refreshingly unsentimental reflection on the pathos of getting older and the myths we create for ourselves about how great things used to be.
