Academy Award-winner Diablo Cody (“Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body”) recently announced her third project, a female anti-hero film titled, “Young Adult,” a story about a divorced author of teen fiction who returns to her hometown to chase her ex-high school boyfriend, who’s now married with a kid. Mandate Pictures recently acquired the rights to the project, which has been described as a story about a woman who is “stalking her high-school sweetheart. It has elements of humor, but it’s pretty serious and fucked up.”
And well, that pretty much nails it all. We read the script this weekend and yes, it’s comedic, but also a dark, and messed-up film that’s quite dramatic. We would say there are spoilers below, but there aren’t really. Cody and the trades have already described the basic plot line and story which you’ve already read, we’re just going to get a bit deeper into the themes and emotions with small details.
It’s also her most mature effort to date, largely dispensing with the annoying slang she’s been tagged with and is refreshingly unhip (though that’s relative, as it is told through the eyes of a vaguely hipster-ish girl who has to spend most of the script in a very unhip place). It’s funny, yet sad/pathetic and a little unflinching in the way it doesn’t let the female lead’s grotesque narcissism and or insecurities off the hook, nor does Cody feel the need to redeem that character in any way.
The film centers on an attractive, but single — and misguided and lost — mid-thirties young adult novel writer living in Minneapolis. Divorced, but not entirely unhappy, this woman’s life is one day radically transformed when she receives a birth announcement from an old, still-idealized ex-boyfriend, triggering something deep inside her. Shook up from the announcement, the insecure and neurotic woman concocts an ill-conceived plan to go visit the small town where she grew up and where her ex-bf still lives with his new wife and child.
Again, the early word in the trades is that the film is about a woman who returns to her small town home to stalk her old boyfriend, and while technically (and de jure-ly) she is stalking him, its a blurry, complicated line and not quite as cut and dry as that (and she has other vices that don’t help). It’s a great way to sell the story of course, a great hook, but it implies the woman is crazy, and while she’s definitely unhinged, insecure, selfish and spiraling, it’s not like the character is a full-blown nutjob (though some men who have to deal with still single 30-something women who feel like they have a ticking clock strapped to their uterus may disagree). What we’re saying is that the script is thankfully much more complex and emotionally layered than “crazy-bitch-stalks-her-old-bf.” The script is empathetic and yet, matter-of-fact. We equally feel for this woman’s plight and we revile her at times as well (a climactic scene near the end is hard-to-watch and painfully cringe-inducing in a tremendously potent way, someone like Noah Baumbach who can really drum up some nasty unlikable characters might blush with envy).
So while the major roles appear to be Mavis, the female lead and Buddy, the ex-boyfriend, one of the central characters becomes Matt Freehauf, an overweight and physically disabled mid-30-something that went to high school with Mavis and then was infamously beat and crippled by jocks who assumed he was gay. Constantly hobbling around on crutches he’ll be stuck with for life, he strikes an odd, adversarial repartee with Mavis that eventually becomes a strange friendship and he becomes the de facto voice of reason throughout the picture, trying to talk her out of her wild ideas and schemes.
There seem to be a lot of parallels with Cody’s actual life, giving the film a slightly autobiographical feel in a what if scenario. Cody is from small town Illinois, is 31-years-old, divorced, obsessed with young adult novels (she’s writing an adaptation of the “Sweet Valley High” teen ’80s books for the screen) and also moved to Minneapolis where she gained acclaim for her blog which eventually launched her screenwriting career (when she was known as her given name Brook Busey). One could easily see all this as a launching pad for a personal, yet imagined what-if situation. In fact, the New York Times recently called the parallels a “career-as-meta-gag.”
But again to reiterate, while comedic, “Young Adult,” is also sad and tragic, with a fairly desperate protagonist who seemingly has everything one would want at her age (at least superficially), including her looks unfaded and at least moderate success. It will likely fall under a type of twisted dramedy category. There’s definitely a theme catching the zeitgeist these days, recently expressed in say, “Greenberg” and LCD Soundsytem’s Sound of Silver (or the song, “All My Friends”), about 30-40-something adults grappling with adulthood and their inherent arrested development, themes that appear to be echoed here, hence the title, “Young Adult” (which is a double entendre and also tethered to the books that Mavis writes, clever, right?). There’s a desperate need to grow up in all these disparate projects, and yet no one seems to know how to arrive at that place of maturity and emotional accountability.
While we’ve honestly drawn a blank when it comes to casting suggestions (ok, maybe Michelle Monaghan as a blonde, some generic 30-something handsome, plain jock for Buddy), the person who immediately jumps to mind for the role of Matt is Brad William Henke, who played Sam Rockwell’s best friend in “Choke.” He would be absolutely perfect for this role and he’s quite excellent in that aforementioned Chuck Palahniuk adaptation.
Cody gets a bad-rap and part of it is probably because she’s female, uses a rock-star like pseudonym and rose to fame too quickly. She’s a much better, more mature writer than the hipster label she received from the “Juno” backlash; people became hung up on the slang-y dialogue, forgetting how well drawn the older characters were and forgetting the obnoxious elements of that picture faded away after 20 minutes and it became quite a heartfelt story.
Also, while riddled with pop-culture slanguage, the “Heathers” meets horror story B-movie that was “Jennifer’s Body” was amusing and well structured on paper (the script), but was completely botched in the tonally-challenged execution (the director), and the director for this film will need to be someone who can strike emotional tenor and balance well. In some ways, it’s somewhat not far off the tone of Robert Siegel’s “Big Fan,” which is humorous and dark, but obviously from a largely different female perspective (don’t get too hung up on that, they’re different things). Someone who does come to mind could be Jason Reitman, but he’s obviously off doing his own thing now.
“It’s safe to say that I need everything to be embellished, creatively or otherwise,” Cody told the the Times recently. “Just like I’m inclined to put on too much jewelry or get too many tattoos, I need my writing to be a little over-the-top.” While that may be the case, and yes, it does contain many self-destructive and fucked-up scenarios, “Young Adult” is certainly her most contained and non, over-the-top screenplay to date.
