Movie reviews
Now a Young Adult (15A) living in a cramped apartment and reduced to ghost-writing a series of books for teens, the hard-drinking Mavis receives an email telling her that her old flame, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), has become a father. Ignoring the fact that Buddy is married, Mavis heads for home, determined to rekindle their relationship.
Ivan Reitman’s movie, which is written by Diablo Cody, is a study of arrested development that begins as a comedy of embarrassment as Mavis swans around Mercury pretending to be a glamorous author, but quickly develops into something darker as the increasingly desperate Mavis reveals her sociopathic tendencies. The character is nowhere as dark as the serial killer Theron played in Monster (2003), but there’s a compelling incongruity between her beautifully manicured exterior and the dangerously self-absorbed narcissism that lies within. Her pursuit of the easygoing Buddy, played in a winningly laidback style by Wilson, ignores the fact that she has far more in common with her ex-high school peer Matt (Patton Oswalt), a cripple who is no less dependent on his visible crutch than Mavis is on her carefully calibrated self-delusion about who she really is.
