How do you make a broken, reprehensible character sympathetic? If you’re Diablo Cody, you don’t … not exactly. Cody penned the script for Jason Reitman’s new film, Young Adult, which stars Charlize Theron (who seems to be making quite a career for herself plunging headfirst into the kind of challenging ground many actresses fear to tread) as Mavis Gary, the once-popular beauty of her small-town Minnesota high school, currently a recently divorced, hard-drinking ghost writer of a once-popular young adult series that’s on the verge of being discontinued. As the story kicks off, Mavis, now living in Minneapolis, gets an email announcing the birth of a baby from her old flame and high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson); the birth notice sets Mavis off on a misguided mission to return back to her long-shunned hometown and rescue Buddy from the hellishly boring life she imagines he’s living, tethered to a wife and child she’s convinced he couldn’t possibly want.
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