2 stars (out of four)
Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a thirty-seven-year-old
divorcee and ghostwriter for what she refers to as a “disturbingly popular”
book series for tween girls. Her name appears not on the book jackets but in
fine print on the inside title page everyone skips over. When a young bookstore
employee declines her offer to sign a few of the store’s copies, she spitefully
tries to autograph one anyway. She is desperate for some love and affection or
at least some attention.
The books she writes are garbage but she doesn’t show much
ambition to become a great literary author. For all her too-cool-for-that
dismissal of the series, she even seems to take pride in them. She eavesdrops
on teenagers’ conversations and works the overheard snippets into her writing.
Still, modest success is not enough for Mavis. She sloths
around her apartment with her pet Pomeranian, which she mostly ignores, fueling
herself with an endless supply of Diet Coke to get her through another empty
day. She harbors depressive alcoholic tendencies for a number of vague reasons,
one of which is her divorce but that seems to be pretty far in the past. Much
more recent is the news that her high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick
Wilson), has fathered a child with his wife (Elizabeth Reaser). This prompts
Mavis to trek back to her hometown – a small Minnesota fishing town called
Mercury – in the ignoble pursuit of breaking up Buddy’s marriage and reclaiming
their now decades-old romance.
There she runs into Matt (Patton Oswalt), an old classmate
who she fondly recalls by the nickname, “Hate Crime Kid.” A few jocks in high
school, mistakenly believing Matt to be gay, jumped him in the woods and left
him for dead, crippling him for life. Twenty years later, Matt is a social
recluse. He works at a local bar but spends most of his time at home where he
lives with his sister and paints action figures. He and Mavis strike up a
friendship, mostly by wallowing in each other’s misery and getting blasted off
whiskey from Matt’s home distillery. Mavis stays focused on the task at hand
though, fearlessly hurtling down a path that cannot end well for her.
Young Adult reteams
screenwriter Diablo Cody with director Jason Reitman, whose previous
collaboration was 2007’s Juno.
Striking a different note here, Mrs. Cody and Mr. Reitman seem to want Mavis to
be at the center of a dark comedy but the script can never pull off the
delicate tonal balance. The jokes are too on point, Mavis’s grand moment of
self-destruction to carefully calculated, Mrs. Cody’s ostensibly poignant
insights into her characters too self-satisfied.
Mavis feels too much like the creation of a screenwriter.
She is the embodiment of a self-absorbed, snarky attitude but not really a
person. We never get a proper sense of what brought her to her current
depressed state or what keeps her in it. There is her divorce, I suppose, and
the heartbreak of Buddy Slade but are we really meant to believe her emotional
turmoil is the result of man troubles now years behind her? In the right
writer’s hands, a mean, vengeful character can be a lot of fun. A petulant,
whiny character, however, is another story.
Ms. Theron admirably portrays Mavis’s passive aggressive,
self-deluding personality with subtlety even when the script is far from
subtle. The same is true for Mr. Oswalt who has a genial presence in an
underdeveloped role. Side players such as Patrick Wilson’s grown-up high school
heartthrob are little more than objects adjusted to satisfy story requirements;
Mr. Wilson’s role in particular feels like a pale imitation of his character
from Little Children, a vastly superior
film about suburban anxiety and unfaithful husbands.
Mr. Reitman, whose previous film, Up in the Air, had such a deft touch in depicting its characters’
social and emotional lives, does little to save Mrs. Cody’s weak script. The
story meanders along without offering many notable details and fades quickly
from the memory. Mavis is so self-absorbed she believes that what happened in
high school is still important twenty years later. I, on the other hand, have a
feeling I won’t remember her problems even a month from now.
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