/ 13 April 2012

How not to grow up

How Not To Grow Up

Charlize Theron is so good in Young Adult that it’s easy to imagine she’s simply playing herself — vain, self-obsessed and manipulative, she’s unable to imagine that she might not always get her own way, or that her outer beauty is not necessarily the trump card she thinks it is.

But maybe the sense that Theron is just playing herself is a result of how good she is in Young Adult, of how real and authentic she feels in the role, whereas her public persona as a rags-to-riches Hollywood star often seems brittle and fake. I suspect it has something to do with that smile of hers, which looks as though it has been surgically engineered for maximum cuteness and sweetness — except the surgeons got it a millimetre or two out of place.

At any rate, we (meaning the General Public) know that Theron is perfectly wonderful and definitely a very nice person, because she has just adopted a child of colour. That puts her on the path to sainthood and a roving Unesco ambassadorship. Her portrayal of Mavis Gary in Young Adult is doubtless a masterpiece of Method acting, in which aspects of the true self are dug out of the depths and deployed in the role — and which raving beauty has not been, at some point, vain, self-obsessed and manipulative?

Mavis Gary is a writer of teen novelettes, hence the title of the movie. The term “young adult” was surely invented to flatter the teens likely to buy (and buy into) such fictions, pretending they’re really more grown-up than they seem, obsessed as they are with the specific problems of high school. I suppose it depends on the book, but those Mavis writes are of the tacky high-school-romance kind and, perhaps inevitably, she herself is still living, in some way, in that world. She’s an adult who really doesn’t want to grow up, or at least not all the way up; someone for whom “young” means she’s still the gorgeous blonde high-school cheerleader who can claim the captain of the football team any time she wants.

Young Adult begins with Mavis getting an email alerting her to the fact that her high-school sweetheart, the perfectly named Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and his wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) have just had their first child.

Congratulations all round, except from Mavis — who suddenly decides that this is the moment to return to the small town where they all grew up, and where Buddy and Beth still live, and reclaim her “soulmate” Buddy for herself. Screw the wife. Dump the kid. Mavis is coming …

This all adds up to a blackly funny movie, written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame and directed by Jason Reitman, who made not only Juno but Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air. Cody has left behind the sentimental warmth of Juno (or is countering it with Young Adult), and Reitman has perfected his particular kind of downbeat, light-but-dark indie-style Hollywood movie. That Young Adult does not offer viewers the usual “sympathetic” lead character, with whom they can “identify” and for whom they can “root”, and that it withholds from Mavis the usual forms of self-redemption, may irk filmgoers wanting the standard-issue comforts, but it makes Young Adult a much more interesting movie.

Teenage angst
Perhaps Mavis would be better off if she wasn’t writing teen high-school pulp but, instead, the kind of “young adult” fiction represented by The Hunger Games, the bestseller by Suzanne Collins that has now been adapted for the big screen. Here the angst of high-school cheerleaders has been replaced by the desperation of a bunch of young people fighting for their lives on a murderous reality-TV show in some dystopian American future.

In this world, the future is also a reversion to the past: barbarism has been updated with a lot of new technology (which makes it not that different to the real historical world). Like feudal tributaries, the areas surrounding the Capitol are required to pay tribute to the new quasi-fascistic regime by each sending a young man and a young woman to play the life-or-death Hunger Games each year.

When her nervy younger sister is chosen by lot to be in the games, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers in her stead.

Luckily Katniss has some bow-and-arrow skills, over and above her native intelligence and so forth, and because she’s the heroine of the piece we know that she is destined to survive — to win — the games. The question then becomes how she’s going to do it. Further, the movie has to come up with plot points in a way that doesn’t besmirch Katniss’s moral character by showing her doing very bad things to ensure her survival. This means a bit of unlikely coincidence here and there, with the invisible hand of Hollywood fate intervening when necessary.

Also, this being a “young adult” work, we have to have the touchy love triangle that is now an essential part of the genre, as pioneered by the last Spider-Man trilogy and, more recently, the Twilight series. The implications of this triangle, and the quivering lips and heaving breasts it evokes, are doubtless going to be dragged out over the full length of a Hunger Games trilogy — for, indeed, this is but the first of three movies.

That said, however, and despite its inordinate length (two hours and 20 minutes), The Hunger Games is pretty engaging viewing.

We viewers are invited to participate in precisely the kind of vicious voyeurism the story is ostensibly critiquing, which is perhaps the result of turning a book into a movie, cinema being an inexorably specular and spectacular medium.

Maybe that deepens the critique; I don’t know. It certainly helps make The Hunger Games a strong entertainment, and Katniss a character we can “root for”. We want her to kill all those other good-looking teenagers she’s up against in this savage Survivor.

And at least she’s not quivering about whether to go with the werewolf or the vampire, or trying desperately to choose between the spider and the goblin — and she’s not fighting for survival against too much in the way of airbrushed, computer-generated visual fireworks. The Hunger Games has a bit more toughness at its core than that.

Mavis Gary, author of “young adult” fiction, take note.