Film Review: Young Adult (2011)

Not pictured: Ryan Gosling doing a keg stand.

 Since winning an Oscar for writing Juno (a film which I thought was terrific and still like very much), Diablo Cody has had a pretty rough couple of years. Her follow-up, Jennifer's Body, was a trashy bit of fluff that was duly trashed by critics and was stillborn at the box office, and her frequently brilliant television series The United States of Tara was unceremoniously cancelled after three seasons. It's not difficult to see Young Adult, which re-unites Cody with her Juno director Jason Reitman, as Cody's response to the last few years. In moments when Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) talks about the cancellation of the series of young adult novels that she has spent over a decade ghostwriting, it certainly feels as if Cody is working out some of her own issues.