Review : Young Adult

I watch the television and see the vision of loveliness that is Charlize Theron in gold, looking pretty damn cool as she struts down the catwalk to utter the words, “J’adore” for the Christian Dior perfume Christmas Ad campaign.   I then go into a darkened room in Soho to watch the film Young Adult, to see Charlize in a completely new light.

When offered the chance to see a screening I suggest someone else in the office picks for me.  They pick Young Adult.  I don’t know what it’s about so I have a quick scout on IMDB.  The poster looks like a Legally Blonde-esque film about a ditzy blonde.  I read the synopsis to find out that it’s built around twenty-something woman who returns to her home town to re-kindle the old flame of her high school love.  She looks like the typical Elle Brooks.  It looks simple, unchallenging and maybe even to have echoes of one of my all-time Julia Roberts favs, My Best Friend’s Wedding!  For all it's Hollywoodness and lack of substance, reader, I happen to love that film.

What I got instead was a confusing and flat depiction of a college queen, Mavis’s, breakdown and subsequent disillusion with reality.

We see Mavis’s daily routine; waking up fully clothed after a heavy night, make-up smeared down her face sometimes lying beneath her date from the night before.  Her dog walks over her sleeping body.  Her room, an obvious metaphor for her life, is messy and and unkept with clothes strewn everywhere. 

She goes back to her hometown after receiving an invite to her ex-boyfriend and childhood sweetheart Buddy’s naming ceremony of he and his wife’s baby boy.  Whilst there, she befriends an old school acquaintance in a bar.  The rest of the film is spent watching her desperate attempt at winning back her former love with in-between scenes of her discussions and contemplations with her new found friend.

The film proved thought provoking, challenging the American ideal "Aint no place like home".  It managed this well, going against the Hollywood conventions of the chick-flick that I had wanted to see.  Each of the main characters, Mavis, Buddy and Matt are examples of American high school stereotypes,  the "prom queen", the "the jock" and the "nerd" which are revealed in this narrative as having moved far out of these roles since leaving school. 

My main problem with the film, however,  was that it seemed like it was trying hard to be powerful and meaningful but when it came to figuring out the meaning or uncovering it’s greatness, I found it flat and empty.  It came to no real revelation or truth and there was no moment of realisation or understanding.  There was the vague sense that we were meant to be laughing at the awkwardness of the situations the main character found herself in.  Its attempts at black humour seemed to fall on their ass as the punch-line just created an awkwardness which left me thinking, “was that meant to be funny?”. 

As it happened, despite coming out of the cinema disappointed, I was sat next to a guy who laughed the whole way through.  It did cross my mind that I could have been sitting next to someone planted by the film company to fill in all of the awkward silences with laughter.