I am still thinking about this movie.
If you have not heard of it, Young Adult centers around Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a woman who writes teenage novels and who has left her small town to live in the big city. She is now divorced, and when she learns that her high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson) is now married and just had a child, she decides that she needs to return to her hometown and make things right. In her mind, what would be right would be if Buddy left his family and relocated to Minneapolis to be with her.
The challenge of this movie is that Mavis is on a mission that not only seems doomed from the start, but it is one that we don't want to see happen. The fact that the movie worked for me is largely due to the character of Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), one of Mavis's classmates that only made a blip on her radar screen, because he was a victim of a hate crime. He is the one in the film most able to be direct with her. He is one of the few people who seems to genuinely want to spend some time with her. He is funny and interesting, and I was happy whenever they were on screen together.
I also admired Charlize Theron's work in this movie. She didn't play the game where Charlize, the actor, is winking at the audience and basically signalling, "Don't worry. I'm not really like this." She didn't make Mavis into a cartoon character. She seemed to genuinely explore what it would be like to play someone this troubled, this narcissistic, this emotionally stunted. I was also impressed with the genuine kindness and strength of the other characters from her past as they tried to honor past ties and tried to divert the shenanigans presented to them. Diablo Cody wrote a wonderful character study with geniuine scenes where characters had moments together. This is the type of movie that I like to see.
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