Young Adult (2011)

IMDb Listing
I don’t really see the value in a movie like this, which basically presents an unlikable character and then asks the audience to delight in her humiliation. In this case, that character is Mavis (played by Charlize Theron), a writer of teen novels who travels back to her hometown to try to win back her high-school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson), who has just had a kid. The condescension and spite flow freely here, from the way that Mavis is conceived of as a character and treated as an object of ridicule by the filmmakers, to the way that her “big-city” life in Minneapolis is portrayed as empty and unfulfilling … just like all the dead-eyed morons in Smalltown, USA. One wonders what kind of life could be lived that meets the filmmakers’ approval. It’s not a very good movie anyway, getting details wrong (what kind of small town has a Macy’s?) and being structured in a way that supporting characters only seem to exist either to tell Mavis what she needs to hear or engage in finger-waving for the audience’s benefit. In fact, one of the characters, played by Patton Oswalt, manages to spend the movie doing both, while being saddled with a grotesque backstory that is further evidence of the filmmakers’ overriding condescension and bile. This is a really ugly, nasty piece of work. 2/10