My wife and I loved Young Adult. I highly recommend it, even though I am aware it will probably be deeply offensive to large swaths of the American population.

Young Adult was panned, basically for being a depressing portrait of a psychologically screwed-up individual who hurts people and who never changes. I don’t think that captures the movie at all. For starters, I didn’t think Mavis Gary was that psychologically screwed up. I fact, I found myself relating to her rather deeply.

Young Adult captures a certain phenomenon that is very real in our society. When you grow up in small towns, you realize there is a pervasive and endemic stupidity and intolerance toward people who differ from the town norm in any way. This stupidity and intolerance can be subtle or extremely viscous, and it can take many forms – physical, mental, emotional. If you are one of these unfortunate, slightly different people, you either leave and never go back (the Charlize Theron character,) or you stay and have a miserable life (the Patton Oswalt character.) Those people that escape (I speak as one of them) can have in mid-life certain moments of mental weakness and insecurity where a longing takes hold to be connected to the old town or to fit in there. Sometimes this leads to doing stupid things in an attempt to recapture something that was never there (here I also speak from  experience.) Usually it ends in disaster, and you wind up back in the big city, living your life as if that wretched little town didn’t even exist.

Young Adult is about a character who gives in to these feelings and goes back, only to find that she was right to escape in the first place, that there was a really good reason (having little to do with her) that those recently rekindled old dreams didn’t happen back then, that everyone’s intolerant hatred is even worse now because they all hate their lives and wish they were her, and that basically the whole town and everyone in it just sucks. It simultaneously tells the story of the guy who should have escaped by any means possible, but didn’t, and is thus condemned to live a miserable life among narrow-minded morons who can never see him for anything more than he was in high school. The kinship these two despised characters form over the course of the film is, in its own strange way, lovely and moving.

I am so amazed by Charlize Theron as an actress. She is definitely one of the elite right now, along with Jessica Chastain, Vera Farmiga, and maybe one or two others. It is difficult to put into words how deeply brilliant she is in this role; many people will probably be too busy being duly repulsed by her to even see how much nuance she is packing into the performance. It’s easy to understand how the Academy missed this performance: she isn’t wearing a fake nose or doing an accent.

Young Adult is a remarkable film. I very highly recommend it.