Young Adult is a 2011 comedy/drama about a recently-divorced fiction writer who returns to her hometown, looking to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend, who is now happily married and has a newborn daughter.
The incomparable Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gray, a ghost writer for a once successful but now ending young adult book series. She’s unhappy, just out of a failed marriage, hopelessly sunk at the bottom of a bottle, and behind on the deadline for the last entry in the franchise. Through a shared email, she learns that an old boyfriend named Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) is having a baby with his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) and it triggers within her a breakdown, convinced that it’s a sign she and Buddy are meant to be together.
She heads back home to Mercury, Minnesota in hopes of getting back what she thinks is hers, under the guise she’s wealthy and buying land. She’s sort of a local celebrity of sorts, and is recognized at a dive bar where she thought she’d meet Buddy, but instead runs into other former classmate Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), an overweight man who, in school, was the victim of a savage hate crime that left him permanently handicapped and a drinker himself.
The two share some conversation and find booze a connection while a few days pass as Mavis attempts to worm her way back into Buddy’s happy life, something he’s entirely not interested in changing. It’s troubling and frustrating, with Mavis clearly a little unstable and in desperate need of help, which most in the town easily recognize.
Directed by Jason Reitman, Young Adult is sometimes bitterly funny, but mostly it’s a tragedy, and if you are even the slightest bit uncomfortable by awkwardly embarrassing moments, then you’ll be fidgeting in your seat for this. That shouldn’t hold you back though as both Theron and Oswalt deliver big, making this a very satisfying little movie experience. When it all builds to its unexpected climax, it’s especially moving and I really like where it takes both these characters. But I want to shine a bit of light on a small supporting character that for most of the movie seems invisible and superfluous until she becomes everything else.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Sandra (Collette Wolfe) is Matt’s younger sister, with whom he shares a house, she working long hours in nursing to help support her brother, who has, even decades after, yet to really reset after the incident, collapsed into a shell of defeat and untapped potential. It’s inescapable.
Anyway, Sandra has been mostly in the background, mentioned but practically unseen to the near end of the film, the larger story of Matt and Mavis consuming all corners of the screen. And then, that changes when Mavis and Sandra have a chance to talk one morning in Sandra’s kitchen. Mavis is on the final spin of her descending spiral, cast into a deep well of self-loathing and gut-wrenching unhappiness, unable to find any warmth in her existence. There sits Sandra across from her, trying to understand, looking a this beautiful successful woman and finding it hard to make sense what she’s saying.
To Sandra, Mavis has been a beacon, a kind of fantasy that something good can come of this life, that dreams do come true, thinking about Mavis in her home in LA and living the good life (not knowing what we know from the start of the film that fame in one small cubby of the world means nothing in another). To believe that Mavis feels unfulfilled seems inconceivable. She then explains that there is nothing in life to most people and Mercury especially, suddenly igniting a spark in Mavis that has her thinking it’s time to leave this all behind. And when she does, Sandra adds one more thing with an unearthly ache in her voice: “Take me with you.”
The reply that follows speaks much about Mavis and her interpretation of who Sandra is and what her part in all that Mavis is leaving behind is … and it’s devastating. She completely misses the plea, and more importantly the sinkhole the woman has found herself in, trapped by the fate of her brother and the collapsing doorless walls all around her. I love the expression on Sandra’s face when she realizes this, Wolfe generating an astonishing little moment of pain that wholly eclipses Mavis. Indeed, when it’s over, at least for me, it wasn’t the arc of Mavis that sticks, but rather Sandra, sitting alone in her kitchen anchored to her empty destiny. This is the real tragedy.