Young Adult is a movie about a YA novel ghost writer, Mavis Gary, who upon finding out about her old high school flame having his first child, decides to go back to her hometown (where her high school boyfriend lives). Mavis had just been divorced and her then popular novel (which she's only the ghost writer, not the author per se) is at the verge of cancellation. She's obviously in a point of her life where she'd feel lost like a puppy, only she is more lost than her actual puppy. Upon returning to her hometown, with the excuse of getting some real estate business done, she immediately looks for her old beau and tries to seduce him. Yes, she is well aware that his ex-boyfriend from high school, Buddy, is now happily married and just had his first child, yet she's still willing to rekindle their romance. Before actually getting to meet Buddy, she first meets Matt, also an old classmate from high school. Matt was the 'loser' that the popular girls like Mavis didn't even notice. However, they're already full grown middle-aged adults, and it doesn't really matter whether you were (or still is) a popular kid. As long as you get along well, you'd be as good as friends. Matt and Mavis had some pretty 'friendly' encounters, and from there Matt knew what Mavis was planning to do.
If you've not yet watched this film, can you already figure out what will happen to Mavis? At the very beginning of the film, I knew what would happen to her. It is fairly easy to predict, and I knew that I just had to check for myself how pathetic this 'successful' woman would turn out upon trying to live her past. The mental breakdown that Mavis experienced is basically what the whole movie is about, and there we have the 'comedy-drama' genre. You will indeed laugh at her drama. I kept telling myself when I was watching this that 'Mavis is such a crazy b*tch' and 'why am I still watching this.' The craziness and absurdity of Mavis and the whole situation is just so amusing that I didn't want to stop watching. "What will become of her?" "How will she get past this crisis?" were my questions that I wanted to answer, that's why I carried on.
I think that maybe I can relate to her in some way. Even though I'm still young (and don't have enough experience) to be saying that I can somehow relate to her, I think that her frustrations and desire to go back to the 'glory days' especially that she's feeling so down is the thing that I really understand. There are some points in our past that we feel that we're invincible and that we're so great, that when we're down and feeling worthless, those feelings from the past will come haunting us in a way that we want to go back, to just experience those again, instead of dealing with the current drama that we're supposed to deal with.
Then again, will Mavis get out of her delusions from the past? Will she be able to snap out of it and be ready to look forward to a better tomorrow instead? I must not reveal, even though we all have a tiny idea on how this will end.
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