Mavis didn't really learn very much, in the end

I think there's something pretty brave about having us watch a character for an entire film and then ultimately not have her get what the point of the film was.

It'd be much more common to have a dickhead reform out of being a dickhead, but that isn't what happens with Mavis Gary in Young Adult, and it's the better film for it.

I watched Jason Reitman's film for only the second time on Friday night, my first since the year of its release in 2011. (And looking back on my star rating from that time, what a monster I was to give it only 3.5 stars. I've softened now. It's at least a four-star movie.)

It's truly a great portrait of malignant narcissism. It follows Mavis (Charlize Theron) through thick and (mostly) thin during three or four days coming home to her Minnesota home town from "the big city" (Minneapolis), after a picture of her ex-boyfriend's new baby appears in her email. Paradoxically, she views this as a sign -- from the universe, from him, it's not entirely clear -- that she is meant to be with him and that this is the time to reclaim him.

Mavis is truly a dickhead, a prom queen who never really grew out of being bitchy to people even though she is now in her 30s. Over the course of the narrative we learn that there is a reason, maybe, that she hates her life and life in general, and sees something better that slipped through her fingers. Yet she still treats people with casual awfulness, only really receiving a sympathetic ear from a high school loser and hate crime victim (Patton Oswalt) who was, in his own words, "born in love with people like her," and, paradoxically, from the wife (Elizabeth Reaser) of the very man (Patrick Wilson) she's trying to steal.

Theron makes Mavis an extremely interesting character, both because she's a great actress and because Diablo Cody has written her really intelligently. In fact, I think this may be Cody's most mature and, yes, adult screenplay in terms of her holding back on her showier instincts toward cleverness, even though other of her scripts have also made excellent movies (Juno and Tully, in particular). We don't really like Mavis as a person, but we like her as a character, and therefore we do hope she will learn something from all the indignities she puts herself and others through during this trainwreck invasion of her old stomping grounds.

She doesn't, but she almost does. That's the smart thing about this film. We get to see Mavis almost, for a moment, realize the effect of her own failed choices and resentments, and the alternately entitled and bitter attitude that has grown out of them, on the others around her. That includes her parents, who seem like decent people just trying to find the good person buried inside her.

In the end, though, she doubles down on the idea that her home town of Mercury is a shithole and that anyone who didn't leave is a loser.

I love this, because it's an honest admission that people are who they are, and they don't usually change their perspective on their entire life from a few meaning-intensive days in which they look themselves in the mirror. When people are told to check themselves before they wreck themselves, it's a lot more likely that they wreck themselves.

It distinguishes Young Adult from something like last year's Her Smell, which I obviously loved (it was my #6 of the year) but which has, you could argue, a far more simplistic and traditional redemption arc. I won't give away all the movie's secrets, but let's just say that Elisabeth Moss' Becky Something starts off far worse than Mavis, and ends up far better. That's over the course of a couple years, though. Maybe Mavis will get there after more time to think about it, but I doubt it. So while I probably like Her Smell better as a film -- hey, I'm a sucker for characters redeeming themselves, just like we all are -- I'd say Young Adult is more true to life.

The cool thing about Young Adult is that Mavis' failure to become a better person does not actually make the movie a bummer. There's a kind of jauntiness to the very ending, even though Mavis is clearly miserable. Maybe that's feeding the part of us that wants to see the prom queen bitch live with her mistakes for the rest of her life.

I was trying to think of other prominent examples of this redemption near-miss, and I did come up with a couple, though pretty rarely in the case of the main character.

One involving a member of an ensemble cast is Ron Howard's Parenthood, and it's the forever scheming black sheep played by Tom Hulce. Despite Jason Robards' best efforts to bring his son back into the fold and help him live an upstanding life in which he is responsible for the well being of his son, including a solid job free from the whims of literally and figuratively gambling away his future, he ultimately has to cut him loose. This is because Hulce's Larry, just a few moments after accepting the offer on the table, tells his dad about this one last scheme he has in mind. It's at this point Robards' Frank realizes his son is a lost cause. Larry almost got the point, but because he was constitutionally unable to change who he was, in the end he missed it.

It kind of makes me think of that great episode of Seinfeld where Jerry temporarily gets in touch with his emotions. By episode's end, the status quo must always be restored, and this episode is no exception. George tries genuinely to play along with this new version of Jerry, not realizing Jerry has already flipped the switch back to detached irony, and tells him he loves him. Jerry smirks and says "Right back at you, slick."

Jerry and Larry and Mavis can never learn, not really. It may make them frustrating human beings, but it makes them great characters -- and what's more, true ones.