Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen “Young Adult”, my thoughts won’t make any sense and they’ll blow the big undeserved plot surprise.
Was it my imagination or did Charlize Theron look super disappointed for not winning the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy? She was brilliant as Mavis Gary in Young Adult— both funny and horrifying as the high school prom queen who never grew up.
If there’s fault with the story, it’s not with the acting but with the writing. Diablo Cody, the very talented screenwriter of Juno who wrote Young Adult, has received a lot of praise for her out-of-the-box story. Cody claims she set out to break all the tropes about this kind of comedy: beautiful bitch goddess forced to face her weaknesses plus big city folks who go back to their humble beginnings and are humbled. Only it doesn’t work.
It did work for me until we get to the baby naming party and then it’s what the what??? Ms. Cody totally did not set us up for the information bomb she sets off at the party.
C’mon Diablo, it’s one thing to break rules but you just bumped me out of the fictive dream here. If Mavis was indeed pregnant then her ex-boyfriend is not only clueless, he’s heartless. And why does Mavis never react to the countless baby references until we get to the party? I call foul.