Devilishly Good

Reliving the angst and the anger of one’s high school days is not a journey one wants to take often, nor a journey that presents well on the big screen of a theater. Diablo Cody dissects the worst high school has to offer, then serves it to theater-goers in a limited release entitled A Young Adult, starring Cherlize Theron (who is incredible as a narcissitic bitch determined to regain her "rightful" place in the world she once ruled), Patrick Wilson (currently starring as a Gifted brain surgeon in a TV drama), and Patton Oswalt, whose name viewers may not recognize, but whose face they immediately know and whose performance demands applause.

The basic premise is one we all experienced: the high school Campus Queen; her forever steady, the campus jock; and the freek who took the brunt of the jocks’ rage at what they, too, feared may be down the road. Mavis Gary lives a miserable life as a young adult, but, at age 37, she’s way beyond the “young” part and nowhere near to being an actual adult. As sometimes happens, a current event triggers the victorious joy of Mavis’s youth, so she returns home to reclaim who she used to be without once considering anyone from her former life. Her focus is Buddy Slade, her high school sweetheart, but there’s nothing sweet about their past: she was an easy lay who put out in the trees surrounding the high school campus. Because Buddy Slade was her favorite sex partner, he becomes her one true love in her fantasies about how great high school was for her.

Mavis needs to have all of that back, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes of Buddy's marriage and the birth of Buddy's baby that trigger the memory of her own pregnancy, a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage, not triumph.

When she arrives in town, she wanders aimlessly, looking for her youth. She sits next to a man at a bar without recognizing him as the person who had the locker next to hers during high school, Matt Freehauf, played by Patton Oswalt, who is outstanding in the film. Matt was taunted as a queer by some high school jocks who then broke his legs, as well as his penis, with a crowbar. Mavis’s yeah-yeah-yeah attitude reveals that she doesn’t remember this event as well as she remembers giving head to Buddy Slade, but when her desperate attempt to regain the glorious life she remembers implodes, she drunkenly turns to Matt for comfort that is not offered by anyone else. Patton Oswalt nails his role in this challenging, difficult movie, weaving together his intense anger at what happened in the past with the necessity to handle it in the present and get through his life one day at a time, a lesson that Mavis needs to learn, but never will.

There is a moment, just one moment, when the movie could have become redemptive, but that moment requires Mavis’s parents to listen and then accept as truth what their daughter says, rather than roll their eyes. After spending several days searching for anything of her past to make sense to her present, Mavis comes face-to-face with her mother, who hears that her daughter is in town and begs her to stop by the family home to see her father. As her parents eat dinner, Mavis remarks that she thinks she’s an alcoholic, a revelation that could, for some sons/daughters, evoke an emotional response from the parents, but Mavis’s parents merely continue eating. The sub-text is that Mavis, the self-centered drama queen, is obviously trying to evoke sympathy from her parents because her life is not what she expected it to be, but her parents have been there/done that – and are not going to give up their own lives to indulge Mavis’s drama. Again.

The movie is dark, difficult, and not an experience many audiences will enjoy. There is not one single redemptive quality about Mavis Gary, no matter how much a viewer may want to witness her epiphany and salvation. Her treatment of her dog reveals how little she cares about any other living thing outside of herself, the dog she leaves locked in a hotel room as Mavis desperately searches for anyone to give a damn about who she was then or who she needs to be now. When everyone she contacts during her brief stay in Hometown, USA disregards her triumphant return, the only constant she has left is the dog, which she stuffs into a carrier and drops onto the front seat of her car as she pulls into the traffic on the highway back to MinneApple.

Diablo Cody takes the worst of high school as an iconic reminder of how much we hated those four years and how relieved most of us are that we never have to go there/do that again. What’s tragic is that there are far too many Mavises in our adult lives, the high school stereotypes that never grow up, move on, make something of themselves now, rather than reliving who they thought they were or who they pretended to be back in the day. For those of us who moved on in spite of our lack of popularity during high school, it's tiring to pretend with them.

Dealing with the past head-on may be cathartic for Diablo Cody, but I’m not sure it’s a journey I needed to take.