Dec. 21, 2011 - Issue #844: The Artist

Young Adult

Young adult or old adolescent? Either way, thirtysomething Mavis (Charlize Theron) is fraying at the seams—literally, since tufts of her hair come out when she fidgets with them, while alone, as she usually is. Flipping through the book of her life—following this tracktopped, sweatpanted, ugg-booted former high-school princess in a small apartment, a nondescript hotel room and box stores—it's both painfully and comically clear why Mavis prefers people judge her by her cover.
Her cover's a chic-looking, successful urbanite, a small-town girl who made it big as a writer (of the Waverley Prep books, a formulaic YA series set in high school and created by another woman). When she returns to little Mercury, Minnesota, glaringly intent on snatching back ex-boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson), she puts a lot of time into this cover, from pedicures and manicures to a stylish new outfit and a hair extension.

Theron's glare, as Mavis cruises down her hometown's main drag, a woman spitefully, steely sure of her social superiority and her romantic goal, slices darkly through many scenes. Young Adult tragicomically stares on at this lost alcoholic, drifting through a hollow strip-mall world but groping back for her teenage days in narcissistic nostalgia. (The opening credits, with close-ups of a tape playing Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" as Mavis sings to it over and over in her small car, are all about spinning one's wheels and being stuck in rewind.)

Diablo Cody's script is closest to her TV series United States of Tara, exploring the precarious mental state of an unlikeable Midwestern woman whose youth's slipped away. Mavis is more crippled than old high-school assault-victim and new drinking buddy Matt (Patton Oswalt). But in its final few sequences, especially, the movie's a study of the self-protecting, pitying presumptions about others that many people prefer to slip into.
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