There are few films that I identify with more than Young Adult. I consider it something of a personal affront that the film was completely ignored by the Academy Awards in 2012, but it’s a much darker comedy than most people can appreciate. I love the intense character study undertaken by Diablo and Jason; surprising no one, Charlize is impeccable as a woman on the verge. In an homage to Mavis and her ironclad liver, I’d recommend playing the drinking game with Maker’s, but if your body (or wallet) can’t handle it, I guess you could just use some Hard Jack’s Cider.
One must drink from beverage when:
- Mavis drinks whiskey/bourbon
- Terrible eating habits are witnessed
- Anyone is addressed or discussed using their full name
- Cosmetic enhancements or maintenance appear in a montage
- Reality TV makes an onscreen appearance
- Any character is appalled by the behavior of Mavis
- Mavis uses her Blackberry
Optional Shit-faced Rule: You have to drink every time they mention Mavis Gary’s career.
I’m so glad someone finally explained the episode the same way I saw it - you’re not supposed to assume it’s real. And it’s not entirely clear that it’s a dream either. It IS supposed to make you think, though…and if you were paying attention, it succeeded.
That’s “One Man’s Trash,” I think. I added that “I think” because being any more definitive than that would violate the spirit of the episode. You can’t “prove” what did or did not happen in “One Man’s Trash,” or say for certain how much of it occupies a place within the show’s established timeline of “real” characters and events. It does feel like an ellipse of some kind — or maybe a cul-de-sac from which Hannah emotionally escapes when the “relationship” goes to hell in a handbasket. (I love that mini-arc, by the way; it reminded me a little bit of that brilliant answering-machine sequence in Jon Favreau’s Swingers.) What’s happening in “One Man’s Trash” is “real” in the sense that it reflects Hannah’s personality, wants, needs, desires, and fears, and perhaps exposes an unpleasant part of herself that she’d otherwise deny. One “tell” that jumped out at me was Joshua’s vague account of the breakup of his marriage, which included what sounded like placeholder dialogue that Hannah would presumably fill in with real dialogue during revision (“ … real stuff that causes problems, and, uh, marriages to end”). Another is the scene where she makes him ask her to stay over and over and over, in different intonations, like an actor in a TV show produced by and starring Hannah Horvath. “I want you to stay” is one reading. “I don’t want to ever be without you” is another. They’re all so needy, and so fantastical, that they become a kind of verbal pornography, designed to give a secret princess an emotional orgasm.
I opened my new blu ray of Young Adult, opened my bottle of Maker’s, and relived the best film of last year. Watching the specials now and I haven’t felt better in months.
Jason Reitman reportedly felt that his last film, Up in the Air, peaked too early in Oscar season, and he was determined not to make the same mistake with his new Young Adult, which he kept under lock and key, releasing nary a print to a film festival or a single scene or trailer online until every other awards contender had showed its own hand. Well, we still haven’t seen anything from Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey (applause on your slow-play, Angie), but now that straggler My Week With Marilyn has finally put out some footage, we guess the coast is pretty much clear? And so we’ve got the first, two-minute look at Young Adult, which reteams Reitman with his Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and, in the movie, reunites an embittered teen-lit author (Charlize Theron) with her former high-school beau (Patrick Wilson), whom she plots to pluck from his happy marriage. If you thought ladies behaved badly in Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher, they don’t hold a candle to Theron in this, and the trailer is not afraid to sell that, playing up her character as “the girl you hated from high school.” But in a landscape crowded with Oscar-baiting antiheroines — this comes out the same day as Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, and a week before Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — is Young Adult most likely to succeed?
Never count Jason Reitman out - he consistently creates classic films. Add Diablo Cody, Charlize Theron, (William and Mary alumnus) Patton Oswalt, and Patrick Wilson and you have brilliance in a bottle. I cannot wait to see this film.
Source: NY Magazine
I gotta testify, come up in the spot lookin' extra fly...
