Formative Performances: Charlize Theron in “Young Adult”

2011 was a great year for women in film, with respected, established actresses and exciting newcomers getting chances to stretch themselves and play different kinds of characters. Of the many strong lead female performances I watched last year, my favorite was Charlize Theron in Young Adult, a performance that was unfortunately overlooked by most of the major awards.

Theron’s character, Mavis Gary, is different from most female characters I get the opportunity to see in film. She’s a professional writer, but she’s neither a dedicated artist suffering for her craft nor an over-the-top caricature of a hack whose writing is comically awful – her prose (that we hear in narration) is boring, yet competent and appropriate for the Sweet Valley High-esque novels that she ghost-writes. She’s an alcoholic and lives off of diet soda and junk food, and scenes of her guzzling an entire bottle of soda are played to an uncomfortable, darkly comic effect. Her apartment is large and luxurious but empty, a sea of blank white space.

The set design and the direction perfectly set up the kind of person that Mavis is, and Theron doesn’t fail to deliver when she takes the reigns of this role. She plays a woman who is both desperately pursuing a last-ditch attempt to be happy, and secretly thinking that happy people are bubbly, uncool losers. Both sides of her character come through in every scene. Watch the one below.

It’s not one of the biggest or best scenes in the movie, but it’s a good example of Theron’s subtle work in this movie – the barely noticeable desperation in the way she greets her ex, the way her smile changes from genuine to tense and slightly forced when she greets her ex’s wife, the fakeness in her voice when she describes the baby as “adorable,” and the fleeting look of rage, pain, and disgust when she looks at said baby.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give credit to Diablo Cody for writing the character of Mavis; I’ve seen Juno and United States of Tara, and while I liked both, I think Mavis as written is the most emotionally honest of her leading women. But I also think the character would have fallen completely flat without the right actress in the role. When Theron plays Mavis, you’re horrified at her lack of empathy and understanding for other people, but the selfish side of you envies her for being able to say that babies are boring without a trace of shame. You despise her, sympathize with her, and want to be her in equal measure, and that’s why hers was my favorite lead performance of last year.