Charlize Theron in "Young Adult"

  DIANA writes:

The movie “Young Adult” is the story of Mavis Gary, a young woman from a small town in Minnesota who on the surface seems to have it all. She’s beautiful, lives in a luxury high rise in the big city (Minneapolis), has a cool job ghost-writing young adult “you go girl” novels for a best-selling franchise, and has her pick of men.

The irony of the title “Young Adult” is that this purveyor of fantasies for young adults is a fraud. She’s a big child, a bundle of needs with no responsibilities. Her apartment is a mess, she’s beautiful but is always slovenly except when she’s cleaning up for a date or to manipulate people, she secretly despises her job, and her only emotional bond is with her toy dog, a Pomeranian. She drinks heavily and pigs out on junk food when things don’t go her way.

She learns via e-mail that an old flame in her hometown has married and recently fathered a baby. She contrives a nasty plan to return to her hometown and drag the old flame away from his wife and child because she’s convinced that he’s a prisoner – no one would want to be married, a parent, and live in that old burg. In other words, her awful loneliness has driven her insane.

I won’t give away the whole plot. Here are my judgements. The film takes marriage and fatherhood seriously. Mavis is clearly shown to be histrionic and manipulative. The townspeople are  kindly, understanding of her, and wanting to help. They know why she is the way she is, and they don’t hold it against her. They accept her for what she is, and want to help her.

Even the concept of hate crimes is ridiculed. One of the main characters was crippled in a nationally publicized “gay-bashing” – but when it turned out that he wasn’t gay (just a fat geek), his case was
dropped from the headlines.

I have two criticisms. One is that Charlize Theron, the lead actress, doesn’t express or embody Midwestern-ness very well. She’s a very good actress, but doesn’t have the ability of the greats to slip into a character entirely. That’s a minor criticism. The major criticism is that the character never truly makes a moral reckoning with herself and learns her lesson. She comes close, but no cigar. Near the end of the film, she has a conversation with an equally deluded woman, a sort of Mavis wannabe – she comes to the precipice of moral awakening and retreats back into her “Young Adult” lifestyle.

Having said that, I commend the filmmakers (“Young Adult” was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jacob Reitman) for telling the harsh truth about the ugliness and sterility of the Sex and the City lifestyle. In today’s Hollywood, no one makes an openly conservative film. You’ve got to slip conservative in without the audience (or the critics, or the studio executives?) noticing it, so maybe that’s why they wimped out at the end. Alternatively, they might be closer to the truth than what I wanted. Perhaps what they showed was that Mavis was too far gone to be saved by her efforts alone. This troubles me.

But I maintain that “Young Adult“ is at its core a conservative film due to its keen observations. I recommend it.

Laura writes:

A.O. Scott of The New York Times did not find the movie particularly conservative. He wrote:

Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow.

But I find his review utterly confusing and difficult to follow.

                                              — Comments —

Diana writes:

A.O. Scott’s review was ludicrous, as were most of the reviews of “Young Adult.”

The review doesn’t specify what, exactly, is so subversive in this film. I’ll tell you: the idea that a life based on endless self-fulfillment (extolled in the series that the protagonist
ghost-writes) is fulfilling.

I’m not surprised by this at all. Most movie reviews nowadays are uncomprehending tripe. The NY Times occasionally has a sharp review but mostly they are worthless. A.O. Scott’s tops the list.

I believe that the reason for the lack of quality in movie criticism is strictly economic: movie reviewers are now industry flacks. Their job isn’t to criticize but to contribute to ticket sales. Saying that
this movie is a slap in the face to everything liberals hold dear wouldn’t be good for ticket sales would it?

But there’s another reason why the reviews are so uncomprehending. I think most people have simply lost the capacity to see what’s in front of their two little eyes. How can they recognize something conservative if they haven’t got the mental equipment to do so?

This goes for Reitman and Cody. I doubt that they set out to make a conservative movie. They are both died in the wool Hollywood liberals. But they did make a movie that is perceptive – which accidentally turned out to be a conservative movie because anything that is true will be conservative, while liberalism is nothing but lies.

Laura writes:

Movie reviewers can’t afford to be honest. For one, they can’t afford to say, given the large amount of advertising dollars newspapers receive from movie companies, that the vast majority of movies aren’t worth seeing.

Diana writes:

Perhaps I’m making too much of A.O. Scott, but permit me the following:

“Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow.”

Oh for crying out loud, what world does this feckless boob live in? Hasn’t every one of our ‘sentimental touchstones’ been ground into paste by 40 years of relentless left-wing indoctrination?

Laura writes:

If you’d spent your professional life soaking up propaganda in movie theaters, you’d probably be a feckless boob too, or perhaps a mental vegetable.

Diana writes:

Sorry for being such a pest on this subject, but this is really bothering me! [Laura writes: That’s perfectly okay. Hey, anyone who is not bothered is asleep or morally catatonic.]

I am reading the comments of the Times review. Here’s one:

“Anyone who says that small town values are debunked in this film COMPLETELY missed the point. The people I saw it with wanted some kind of redemption for the lead at the end but if you have experience with narcissists you know that’s impossible. May not make a great hollywood ending but its closer to the truth. Not a great film but certainly as good as most of what’s out there.”

Yes! A.O. Scott is a good example of a deranged modern liberal: his ability to recognize decency has become completely non-functional. I find his and other people’s reactions to this film to be very
revealing.

Eric writes:

I saw the film, and agree with Diana, not A.O. Scott. Maybe the Times should hire her.

It was a good film, rare these days. Worth watching.

KB writes: 

Here’s how “Young Adult” is subversive, even with its conservative undertones. 

The film falls into the trope of the hero who returns to his place of birth to improve it through his experience with alien cultures and peoples. A lot of B-grade Bollywood (Indian) films fall into this category. If the suave, urbane type isn’t the villain of the story then he’s the misguided hero who returns to his provincial village of boors who teach him a thing or two about life. Along the way he may use a skill learned in foreign lands to solve a problem in the village, perhaps a family feud. Thus he shows the village that they need men like him to survive. He falls in love with a girl in the village, perhaps the very one who undercut his cosmopolitan arrogance by reacquainting him with the romance of rural life. At the end of the film, he proposes marriage and life goes on. Sprinkle in some tawdry humor, steppinfetchits, some hand-to-hand combat with the village toughs and you have an archetypal tale that is consumed by almost every civilization on the planet. 

Judging by the summary of “Young Adult” on Wikipedia, no one learns much of anything in this film. It almost reads like a horror movie which is the reaction you would get if you ever asked an urban liberal about their pre-college years. I have noticed that many modern comedies resemble survival horror, or have lifted themes from horror films entirely.

Diana writes:

KR writes: “Here’s how “Young Adult” is subversive, even with its conservative undertones.”

No, “Young Adult” is subversive precisely because of its conservativeundertones, not “even with.” The phrase “even with” denotes that
conservatism is not the subversive element. In our environment, it is.

The rest of KR’s description of tropes doesn’t fit the movie I saw.The “rubes” in this film don’t learn anything – but they are not represented as having to. It would be going too far to suggest that Jason Reitman has read any Tolstoy, in which the Russian peasant is counterposed against the Frenchified gentry – but the message is thesame. Tearing up roots is dangerous if you have nothing better to takeits place.

Josh F. writes:

A.O. Scott’s review is what we would experience as the effect of a practicing radical liberal. To exist in a radically autonomous state (absolutely liberal), one must be nothing in particular. One must be totally nondiscriminatory and absolutely tolerant. The overall effect is that someone like A.O. Scott can completely absorb and assimilate the message of a movie without personal effect (absolute tolerance) thus rendering his ability to articulate a meaning back to us as completely incomprehensible (totally nondiscriminating).

To be radically autonomous means to be radically autonomous. Only Auster’s “unprincipled exception” exist as the liberal’s sole survival mechanism. That, or be something particular. Something known and comprehensible. Something anti-liberal.

Like a shape-shifting alien giving movie reviews in an alien tongue, he subtly pulls us into a world where everyone starts living by “unprincipled exceptions.”

Laura writes:

Excellent statement. But I am confused by this sentence:

The overall effect is that someone like A.O. Scott can completely absorb and assimilate the message of a movie without personal effect (absolute tolerance) thus rendering his ability to articulate a meaning back to us as completely incomprehensible (totally nondiscriminating).

Josh writes:

Eric writes:

I just read the A.O. Scott review. It was utterly clueless, a debris of words. It is the kind of thing you get when a liberal reviews a movie that is a brilliant conservative riposte to the last forty years of social destruction.

Laura, you are going to have to see this film and cast the deciding vote.

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