You can't go home again--nor should you

As promised, I’ve prevailed on one of my learned friends to write here in the spirit of a bluestocking gathering—although 18^th century drawing rooms did not have movie chat to enliven things. Presenting Mme Morningstar, who I hope you will be reading more from in the future…..

Young Adult

“Young Adult,” starring Charlize Theron, recently opened to good reviews, but not great business, as I understand it.  Once you see the movie, the reason becomes clear.  Movie goers are very reluctant to see a beautiful woman looking scruffy and acting mean.  It upends their understanding of movie heroines as well as movie stereotypes, and makes viewers generally uncomfortable.

But this movie is something else again.  Here is Charlize Theron, who received a predictable Academy Award for playing the man-killing lesbian-with-an-overbite/sometime prostitute Aileen Wuornos in “Monster,” (2003), looking as unattractive as a beautiful woman can look in American movies.  In “Young Adult,” Ms. Theron, as Mavis Gary, is again willing to look unappealing.  Every morning, she wakes up flat on her face in bed, often still in her street clothes, the TV droning, her little Pekenese (I think) dog hungry and lonely for her.  She is a mess.  She is any one of us who drank too much, got a rotten night’s sleep, and, upon awakening, instantly regrets whatever half-remembered adventure of the night before.

But then, we watch, as Ms. Theron, playing a ghost writer of young adult fiction, having escaped small-town life and living in the big town—Minneapolis!--dolls herself up.  Not in a creepy Kardashian way, either.  But in the way that pretty girls have always known how to do.  Without thinking about it, she chooses the right eye shadow for day or night wear, the perfect glossy (not too-glossy) lipstick of exactly the right shade to complement her coloring, the perfect foundation that blends her facial imperfections, should she have any.

And she is a pretty woman.  Which is part of the point of the movie.  Mavis is one of those who made it out.  She was the high school prom queen, the most popular girl, the one who everyone in school adored and loathed.  She doesn’t even remember the guy who had the locker next to her for all four years, but he sure remembers her.  She was barely conscious of anyone except herself during her youth, but she does remember one thing.  It was the best time of her life.  It was the best of her.  She was at her most beautiful, her most hopeful.

I saw the movie with a female friend, a very pretty former high school cheerleader, of course, who knew all about that beauty stuff in high school, but knows how to be a good friend and is a lovely person.  At one point I whispered to her, “She’s like your evil twin.”  She didn’t deny it, but only said, “She’s so much prettier than me.”

Mavis never had any intention of returning to Mercury, Minnesota, if she could help it.  She lives in the Big Town—Minnie-apple—as it is called.  It is not love that calls her home, though she does return intending to “save” her former boyfriend by wrecking the life he has made for herself.  She is bored, she is late on a deadline and mostly, she is procrastinating.

And she has somehow forgotten that nothing shouts boredom so deafeningly as your past.

And this trip bashes another movie trope, thank heavens. The “it’s-always-better-back-home-you-know-it-is” myth.  If it were so good, why would all those smart, clever, and creative people who used to write those movies have left to go to Hollywood and write those movies?  The yearning for small-town life, for old-fashioned values, as the Republican Party has been calling it since Richard Nixon, doesn’t exist and never did.  That’s why people leave.  Mavis’s Mercury is no different.  Had she stayed, her life would have been no more fulfilling than it is in the city.  As I used to tell a friend of mine who hated every town she ever lived in, “It’s not the town.”  Unstated, of course, was the truth of it:  “It’s not the town, it’s you who isn’t trying harder to be happy.”  Or, better, “It’s you, who isn’t recognizing happiness when it accidentally finds you.”

Ms. Theron makes such a complete transformation from beast to beauty and back to beast, both internally and externally, that the view is quite enthralling.  She is an uncompromising character in an uncompromising movie.

Written by Diablo Cody, the screenwriter for the rather over-praised but cute enough, “Juno” (2007), we are witness to a different kind of Hollywood story.  One without a Hollywood ending.  Oh, there’s a bit of hope, maybe, but the bad girl does not necessarily learn her lesson, come to her senses, or change. 

“No hugging, no learning” was said to be the idée fixe behind “Seinfeld.”   Perhaps “Young Adult” is the romantic movie for the post-“Seinfeld” age.  There’s not much romance in it. 

And for a bad girl, Mavis is not the worst.  She’s not nice. But she’s not terrible.  How refreshing to see a mean girl as we know mean girls to be.  They were like this in high school, and they’re like this 10 years later, just with better hair and clothes. Not everyone can change.  Not everyone wants to change.  In their view, it’s the rest of the world that should.  For once, a movie tells us what that life looks and sounds like without flinching or fibbing.

Mme Morningstar