Young Adult is about a woman who acts selfishily & without even an eyedropper's worth of compassion and fucks up people's lives, which is what tends to happen when ignorant delusion comes to town. That's it. Though it deserves credit for avoiding mawkishness and nostalgia by making nostaliga the troubled heroine's front-and-center escape mechanism (that is obviously like a life-raft made of popsicle sticks on its way toward Niagra Falls), it goes too far the other way with no opening or possibility for awakening or awareness whatsoever and forces the viewer into a cloistered mode of pity and revulsion. Which is not to say there's no room for shitty characters in art (c.f. any story by David Foster Wallace) but there has to be some air in the room to breathe, whether via insight through a narrator, the other characters, or whether through the structure of the work itself. So this then is my obvious question that I ask non-rhetorically: what was the point? If you're the kind of person that acts like the monstrous heroine, could this film shake you out of your self-deceptions? (Odds are low.) And if you're not, then there's not much else here besides the aforementioned unpleasantness. B- because Charlize Theron's performance is the absolute temperature of ice, which is worth something, no?
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