Young Adult (2011)

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody reunited after Juno to make Young Adult, a film about a woman who is not likable and is not meant to be. Mavis Gary, 37, divorced, alcoholic, ghostwriter of a dying young adult series, drives back to Mercury, Minnesota to steal a married man. The film watches her do it without a single word of instruction to the audience. This is a sour character study, and it stays sour to the last frame.

Charlize Theron's Mavis is a woman the audience is invited to dislike, and the screenplay never converts that into a thesis about women. Her depression, her drinking, her hair-pulling are rendered as private wreckage, not as a condition with a social meaning to be honored. The casting is nearly all white, though Patton Oswalt's Matt Freehauf, disabled and disfigured by jocks who assumed he was gay, gives the film a prominent disability role played by an able-bodied actor. That beating is the closest the film comes to a queer thread, and it functions as backstory and plot texture, not as representation. Mercury, Minnesota contains no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no grievance against wealth. The cancelled book series is a career problem, not a comment on publishing capital.

Where the film could have lectured, it declines. Matt tells Mavis to grow up, and the line lands as a dramatic rebuke between two damaged people, not as a moral handed down to the viewer. Nobody in this film improves, and nobody is corrected on the audience's behalf. The result is a cold, well-acted portrait of arrested development that trusts its own unpleasantness. That refusal to sermonize is the most respectable thing about it.