Film Review | Young Adult

"It's really hard for me to be happy," Charlize Theron's deluded teen fiction-ghost writer Mavis Gary proclaims towards the end of Jason Reitman's growing-up dramedy Young Adult.

Perhaps this is more of a universal statement than we'd like to admit, cutting straight to everyone's innate sense that there's something crushing about how life turns out to be disappointing after you lurch your way to a certain age... and you don't even have to be that old to experience this barrel of psychological angst, either.

Written by Juno's Diablo Cody -part-time stripper/blogger turned screenwriter, who nabbed herself an Oscar for her efforts - the film sets out to explore this human dilemma with a light touch, but sadly founders for lack of having all that much to say after the characters have been introduced and the barrage of awkward gags has been used up.

There's little fault to be found with Theron's performance as the shockingly self-absorbed Mavis, though.

The former high school beauty queen has, for all intents and purposes (and barring a recent divorce), 'done good': moving out of her native "hick town" of Mercury, Minnesota and into the glittering city of Minneapolis where she's scored a career as a ghost writer of the hugely popular 'Waverly Prep' series of young adult novels.

After she receives an email informing her that her high school sweetheart, Buddy (Patrick Wilson) - now married - is celebrating the birth of his first child, Mavis decides this to be an omen: she will travel back to Mercury and wrest Buddy out of his mundane, domestic existence (as she sees it) and ride off with her true love into the sunset.

Unsurprisingly, things don't go according to plan... though Mavis does find something of an unexpected kindred spirit in Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former schoolmate who is left permanently bruised (both physically and emotionally) after an unsavoury encounter with a group of irate high school jocks.

Though she had 'uglied up' for her Oscar-winning turn as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, here Theron undergoes a more subtle - and often more interesting - transformation.

Though her perpetually dour expression and baggy eyes give away both her age as well as her none-too-pleasant disposition, Mavis remains pretty - stunning, when she makes an effort - and she doesn't flinch from flaunting what seems to be an impressive professional track record while in the presence of old friends and acquaintances, all of whom appear to be blind to the fact that for the most part, it's all just a sham.

While Cody appears to be revisiting the small-town milieu that gave Juno its setting, zeroing in on an irredeemable bitch and former prom queen also betrays shades of her more recent effort: the Megan Fox-starring horror comedy Jennifer's Body.

The humour is just as merciless here, though there's an attempt to make the drama more worthy, to make it speak to a universal human experience rather than teenage horror clichés. With its focus on what is essentially an onset of mid-life crisis, the film also has shades of Reitman's superb Up in the Air - a meditation on not committing and, ultimately, being unable to move on.

But shades alone do not a good film make. For all its razor-sharp lines and its spot-on performances (both Wilson and Oswalt are more than able foils to Theron), Young Adult never really nudges its way out of its own pitch. Because Mavis is sketched out in such fine brushstrokes, we know more or less straight away how it's all going to pan out.

Not to say that it isn't intriguing to watch Mavis crash and burn. This is essentially Mean Girls: The Twilight Years... a seductive proposition, surely? Just as we secretly enjoy watching the deluded souls who rush in droves to X-Factor auditions hoping to score their 15-minutes of fame (or, more tragically, an even longer shot at glory), seeing Mavis fall pray to her own narcissism plays on our own darker instincts.

But it would all have worked better as a short film: a snapshot of a lost soul who could very easily become a whirlwind.

All this has not been in vain though... make no mistake, Young Adult is still worth a watch... and if nothing else, it's alerted us to Theron's talent as a villainess, which should come full circle when she assumes the role of the wicked witch Queen Ravenna in the upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman.