The personification of evil rarely wears ‘Hello Kitty’ products.
With all due respect to Real Steel, Young Adult has the most loathsome hero of the cinematic year. Unlike Real Steel, that’s the point of Young Adult, a tale of a would-be homewrecker jus’ tryin’ to make bad in the stix. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, an odious and vile woman whose big city life is such a mess she takes it upon herself to go win her small town high school boyfriend back, but only after discovering his “I just had a baby” announcement. Luckily, this evil creature’s only true talent is being able to look good, which might have gone far when she was a teen, but counts for little once you become, well, an adult.
I never actually heard of somebody who set out to wreck a home; especially somebody capable of looking as awesome as Charlize Theron at her best. This ought to be good.
I suppose Mavis isn’t really evil, but as she’s far too immature to notice the difference, it amounts to the same. She drinks heavily and constantly, eavesdrops on teen conversations in order to keep up at her job as a ghostwriter for an outdated series of trashy teen series novelettes (not unlike the Sweet Valley High series, not that I would know anything about any such publication, of course. Never!), oh yeah, and as previously mentioned, she went back to her small town to steal away her old flame Buddy (Patrick Wilson) from his wife and newborn. This does lead to one of my favorite lines of the year in which Mavis responds to the challenge of, “I have a wife and baby that I love” with, “together we can beat this thing.”
A fantastic complement to Mavis is Matt, Patton Oswalt’s finest role to date, hands down. Matt is one of the losers unable to escape from his hometown, but here he acts more like Mavis’ conscience. It’s not unlike the relationship between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. And in the film, Matt is constantly around Mavis, but never really interacts with any other character. In a lesser film, you’d call this poor screen-writing. In a Diablo Cody script and a Jason Reitman film, I question whether or not Matt really 
exists; ugly and fat on the outside with crippling disability, he is the outward projection of Mavis’ inward repulsion; and with his good-natured disposition, he’s like a Mavis photo-negative – ugly on the outside, beautiful from within. Does he exist outsides the confines of Mavis’ mind? I think there’s a good essay there.
This is as daring and impressive as anything Charlize Theron has done to date. I won’t qualify that. In a way, she’s more of a monster here than she was in Monster. She doesn’t act out of hate, but out of spite and jealousy. These are much uglier emotions. Hate can be forgiven; there’s always a trigger. Spite can’t. And her look – borders on cruel. In the same film in which she on several occasions is absolutely drop-dead stunning, she allows herself to look awful. And not just bed-hair awful. Not just “oh, don’t look at me, I’m hideous” awful. I mean AWFUL. Slept-in-your-clothes drunk awful. Trash talk awful. Bodily functions awful. Bald spot in your scalp awful. Wake up and drink Coca-Cola straight from the 2-liter bottle awful. Sleep with a guy you don’t like and then leave, and leave him in your apartment awful. In other words, bachelor-man awful. Charlize Theron does the impossible in this role – she makes an ordinary guy say, “huh. On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t hit that.” Acting!
In fact the effectiveness to which Charlize has tackled this role is exactly why I can’t put it top-10. I can’t stand Mavis. I don’t want her to succeed and I desperately search for something else for Young Adult to show me. And, of course, you can get all psychological up in this house and talk a clever tale from a very clever director, very clever writer and talented actress, but when it comes right down to it, Mavis just needs to grow up. Plain and simple.
Rated R, 94 Minutes
D: Jason Reitman
W: Diablo Cody
Genre: High school reunion, wooo!
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Marching band geeks
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Prom queens
