Young Adult

We all know a woman like Mavis Gary. She's the kind of girl who everyone feared in high school, who was always effortlessly beautiful, and yet she had no personality whatsoever. She would do whatever was thought to be "cool". Her loved-but-feared status meant that she probably barely registered your existence at all. We assume that this kind of woman goes on to do great things, and becomes an amazing person who would have a whole new generation of people fearing her, but that is not always the case, and that is where we meet Mavis, in Young Adult.
Diablo Cody will forever be known for writing 2007's hip-dialogue laden and instantly memorable Juno, a somewhat controversial teen comedy, which served as a star vehicle for Ellen Page, ensuring that she will play rebellious teenagers well into her thirties. Diablo Cody has reunited with her Juno director, Jason Reitman, for Young Adult. I would like to mention that aside from auteur moments in Cody's writing, this is nothing at all like Juno, and that's a good thing.
Young Adult is the study of a borderline psychotic personality. It's the story of Mavis Gary, a woman pushing 40, who lives alone, with her obviously neglected Pomeranian, in her disheveled condo in Minneapolis. She is a ghost writer of young adult fiction, which is ironic, considering she hasn't grown up at all since high school. She is not emotionally matured in any way, and thinks that her living in a neighboring city of her suburban hometown means that she has a life. She gets an e-mail from an old high school boyfriend who invites her to a baby-naming ceremony, or something like that. Fully intending to get him back, she blatantly ignores the fact that he is a husband and new father. In her mind, there is something not right in the universe, and she intends to fix it.
We don't really know, as an audience, if we are supposed to feel empathy for Mavis, or if we should just feel pity. At several points in the film, we see Mavis laying face-down on a bed, either in her cold pigsty apartment, or her hotel room, where she appears to be dead. She's never dead, just dead drunk. Her character says to her parents at one point, "I think I might be an alcoholic", and the statement is largely ignored. Anyone who says this aloud knows damn well that they are, and the fact that her parents ignored this statement shows you what kind of family this woman came from. Mavis is definitely an alcoholic, seen repeatedly drinking heavily just to make it through the day. She may as well have been drunk in every scene. This is a study of a depressive character, but the thing that bothered me was that her parents ignored this statement, because they would obviously rather pretend that there is no issue. It's upsetting, but like I said, it shows where this woman became this way. That's good writing.
This film works because the lead character is extremely well written and observed, but also because Charlize Theron knocks this one out of the park. First of all, before I get to any other facts about this character, I must say that Theron plays a drunk very well. The last thing I remember seeing her in was her infamous performance as Aileen Wournos in 2003's Monster, and it is going to sound trite, but she's playing a different kind of monster here. She is a woman whose main goal in this film is to break up a marriage. She gave so much of herself to this character, and she may as well be responsible for the film's success. I personally liked Mavis, a character who we're supposed to hate, or feel great pity for, and I give Theron most of the credit for that.
With Juno, Thank You For Smoking, and Up in the Air, and now Young Adult, Jason Reitman has a fantastic track record. I have enthusiastically enjoyed each of his films thus far. It's interesting for me to think of this film as a companion piece to 2009's Up in the Air, two films about emotionally stunted individuals. George Clooney's character in Up in the Air didn't want to feel anything, and didn't want to get too close to anyone. The film ends with him not exactly changing, but moving forward in his life, ignoring factors that would have emotionally devastated the average person, and just moving forward. Meanwhile, Mavis is irrevocably stuck in the past. The best time in her life was high school, where she was popular and kind of feared, and now she is just pitied. Yet she is obsessed with making her glory days a reality again.
There is nothing warm, sentimental or happy about the ending of this film, let me just say that right off the top. The film itself is dour, bleak and emotionally brutal. The performances are powerful, and the writing is excellent, yet it doesn't have the warm, happy, everything- is-better-all-of-a-sudden ending that American audiences are used to, and that's a damn good thing. Most character studies about unlikable people typically have the antihero change for the better in the end, in an ending where everything is warm, and everyone is left happy, but Mavis doesn't get off the hook that easily. While the film, in a whole, is quite depressing, its brand of black-as-night comedy is refreshing and welcome. I would call it the meanest Hollywood film this year, and that's a very good thing.

In the Valley of Elah

There are many people out there who hate the way Paul Haggis made his directorial debut, "Crash," an overly soapy and stupidly-tied-together drama (at least, that's what it felt like to them). Those people don't have to worry. His second major directorial outing, "In the Valley of Elah," avoids both of the "mistakes" (although I'd hardly call them that, seeing as he won Best Picture for what he did with "Crash") that he made last time around. Instead of mixing together multiple stories and having them all connect at the very end, this movie revolves around one main story, a story that seems a lot like the modern-day war version of "Chinatown." Instead of going for simple emotional tugs that he did with "Crash," this film focuses on its understated performances, namely from Tommy Lee Jones, who is superb in this film. It is truly courageous of Paul Haggis to be willing to make some serious changes to the style that won him a Best Picture Academy Award, and even more impressive that he pulls it off very well.
The story revolves around an ex-military officer, Hank Deerfield, who is told that his son, a soldier returning home from Iraq, has gone missing. Jones plays the character in such a quiet way that makes you feel like he thinks he shouldn't be showing emotion, but has a lot of it bottled up inside of him. When he arrives at the military station, people don't seem to want to tell him what happened, and say that they expect he'll come to the base anytime soon (this is portrayed especially well by James Franco, who you may know as Harry Osbourne from the "Spider-man" movies).
Refusing to believe that it's as simple as that, Deerfield is relentless in getting information out of people as to what really happened. It's the way he functioned in the army, and it benefits him greatly as he has to get any information he can out of people. Enter Detective Emily Sanders (played by a very strong Charlize Theron), who at first just wants to get through her job for the day, but soon gets wrapped up in also discovering what really happened to Deerfield's son. The two of them have great chemistry together, as their two different personalities give two different perspectives on what's happening.
The movie works because although it does have quite a few negative things to say about the current war in Iraq, the entire film isn't a two-hour tirade against it. It only makes that message part of the story, and does it in subtle ways (aka the soldiers don't just go "War...it...destroys...you..." but take a lot more time expressing their emotion). Much of the story works like a mixture between the great film "Chinatown" and a much better-acted, better-written version of a really good episode of "CSI." Although there may be a few too many twists and lies circling about, it comes to its conclusion very well in a satisfying way for the audience.
Paul Haggis has an uncanny way of bringing out great performances from all of his actors. The performance of Tommy Lee Jones could be the best of his career, he brings out a much more emotionally quiet side in Charlize Theron than we've before seen, the short performance of Susan Sarandon is particularly powerful, and all of the soldiers are played with a feeling of sincerity. The acting is probably the strongest element of the film, and if there's any "weak part," it would have to be the way Haggis forced out some of the plot twists to make the film as long as he wanted it to be.
Regardless of its few problems, "In the Valley of Elah" is both a very well-mannered look at the war in Iraq and its effects on the people involved, as well as a very interesting crime thriller. At the heart of it is Haggis's quietly powerful directing style and the cast's powerfully quiet performances. I don't see this picking up a Best Picture nomination as Haggis's past three Oscar hopeful screenplays ("Letters from Iwo Jima," "Crash," and "Million Dollar Baby"), but I would not be surprised to see it pick up a few acting nominations as well as possibly a screenplay nod. If it does...it would have definitely earned it.