Review of Young Adult (2011) by Fabulous H — 24 Dec 2012

For almost the entire 93 minute run of 'Young Adult,' I was uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that my stomach began to hurt, and I had to force myself to not watch the bulk of the film through my fingers, as if I were watching a particularly gory horror film.

This isn't the first movie to make me uncomfortable, and it won't be the last, but I'm fairly certain that it will be the only one to have ever made me feel uncomfortable for no good reason whatsoever. Usually, in similar indie flicks obsessed with mining the most cringe-inducing, awkward situations it can put you in, the pay off is that the character realizes something about herself, or the world she inhabits, or those around her. She changes.

Those gory horror films? Well, usually the payoff is that something big and scary jumps out at you, and you're startled, and you feel exhilarated. Maybe in the end the protagonist survives, and, if you're lucky, the film has used the filmic devices associated with horror to explore interesting thematic content or maybe even say something about our world and the people that inhabit it. If you're not so lucky, the movie has made you feel uncomfortable just to make you feel uncomfortable. Well, maybe you like that. Sometimes I do.

Well, in a sense, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's 'Young Adult' is more the latter than the former, albeit without the exhilarating starts. Yeah, it dresses itself in the tropes of your typical quirky indie comedy, it plays out those same beats for much of the film. It has all the elements to be a cutesy, idiosyncratic, intelligent romcom, even featuring a fairly hilarious meet-cute between two unlikely pals. But things don't go that way you would expect, that we've been taught to expect. This, it turns out, is more of an awkward case study of a highly functioning sociopath.

Now, this in and of itself isn't what I disliked about this film. It is entirely possible for a movie to disguise itself as one genre while trying to make a point about the tropes of that genre and the way we perceive and interact with the world because of it. 'Cabin in the Woods', for instance, is a brilliant take on the horror genre that does just that. It's admirable for Reitman and Cody to take on the quirky, indie genre which has become a fixture in American film, the go-to reprieve from those big, commercial blockbusters that dominate the multiplexes. The indie genre--which Reitman and Cody helped cement into place as an American institution with their much loved (but overrated) 'Juno'--deserves to have the piss taken out of it. Much could be said of the way the indie films (which are not so indie anymore, not in any meaningful way) portray the world and codify certain behaviors and emotional reactions and social interactions. How they tend to present only a very slim slice of American life which revolves exclusively around upper middle class white people with disposable income, whose largest problem is almost always boredom. How they refuse to tackle the questions of ennui and alienation as being institutional problems rooted in late stage capitalism. How they themselves are little more than commercial vehicles, designed to appeal to a particular niche that uses their love of these movies to feel smart and, maybe, not quite so alone. I could go on.

The problem with 'Young Adult' is that while it attempts to flip the indie genre on its head, it goes about it so ineptly, and so devoid of emotion, that it ends up being an example of all the worst aspects of the genre while doing nothing to right them or even draw attention to them at all. It's like the writers thought, oh, *this* will show them. As if making the protagonist unlikable and totally incapable of change or redemption is all that they had to do. There is part of me that feels that the movie would have been far more satisfying had it just played out the way people expected, with Theron's character realizing how awful she's been, maybe even turning her one night stand with geeky Patton Oswalt into a real relationship, with everyone living more or less happy ever after. Instead, the film cuts us off at the pass, and, at the pivotal moment, instead of realizing the error of her ways, Theron is given the worst, most cynical advice possible, and then steps on her adviser's head on her way back out the door.

And even here, the film still could have worked. The central conceit isn't a bad one, but because Reitman and Cody use it so ineptly, and do absolutely nothing to let the viewer in on the joke, 'Young Adult' becomes satire of the worst kind: satire that treats its audience as a bunch of idiots. There is no pay off. The film only makes you feel uncomfortable because it can, because it wants to rub your nose in your enjoyment of films with things like, say, character arcs, or redemption, or something interesting to say whatsoever. It wants to punish you, because, in the end, 'Young Adult' is one of the most mean-spirited films I have ever seen.