The Last Movie I Saw

I really enjoy it when an actor commits to a part so fully that by the end of the film it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role. Charlize Theron, who could have easily opted to be typecast as a glamor girl from day one in her career, deserves a lot of credit for taking on characters who have few, if any, redeeming features, as she did in her Oscar winning performance for Monster. That's also the case in Young Adult, directed by Jason Reitman and written by Cody Diablo (the team responsible for Juno a couple years back). In the new film, Theron plays a writer of books for teenaged girls, and is so locked in to the kind of personas defined by high school cliques that she can't recognize that she herself no longer inhabits that world. So, suffering from writer's block, she returns to her hometown on a mission to win back her first sweetheart, though he is now a decidedly settled, married dad. Theron really throws herself into making her character's pursuit of the past unsympathetic, with no little lapses or actorly "winks" to signal that she's really not so bad. Because we're so conditioned by moviemaking conventions, we may want to believe that she's not totally beyond redemption. But when that redemption doesn't come in the end, it rings true, and you don't feel like you've been cheated of something-- it's a deserved failure, because by that point you get that Theron's icy demeanor was much more than a mere facade. She really does seem to dislike virtually everyone with whom she interacts, many of whom presumably had a hand in shaping how she turned out (e.g. her parents and other old classmates). You could argue that she makes an exception for the character played by Patton Oswalt, a tragic victim of high school hazing who manages to bond with Theron-- but that bond seems largely defined by their mutual dependence on alcohol, and maybe a momentary transference of Theron's self-pity onto someone else. It's definitely a dark story-- funny in spots, but not exactly a comedy. For me it worked because it remained true to the proposition set up from the outset-- that Theron was a deluded narcissist-- and they cast an actress who was not only able, but comfortable in fully exploring that condition.