Charlize Theron plays a woman who was the queen of her high school, and has never really moved past that point. She ghostwrites a series of books about some oh-so-wonderful and popular girl at a prep school (the series is being concluded), she passes out drunk most nights, with or without a guy.
She gets an e-mail that her high school boyfriend (played by Patrick Wilson) and his wife are celebrating the birth of their first child, and decides the correct course is to return to her hometown, and get back together with him. She ends up, for lack of better options hanging out a lot with the guy (Patton Oswalt) who had the locker right next to her, who she does not remember. (She doesn't really remember anyone from high school other than her ex).
I can't decide if I should feel bad for her or not. Watching her desperate attempts to recapture the point in time when I guess she felt like she had everything the way she wanted it is sad and painful. It might be meant to be funny, but I mostly feel embarrassed for her. But she's also a self-absorbed asshole. Oswalt's character was severely beaten in high school because a bunch of jocks thought he was gay (he wasn't, but they were also assholes). She kind of dismisses that experience, reducing either to Oswalt to being 'the hate crime guy', or that it's just something he uses as a crutch to excuse his life.
Which, I don't doubt that the experience had affected how the character interacts with people, but even if she's right, it's affected him in a way that's not so great for his personal happiness, but not harmful to anyone else's. She can't say that, since she's still caught in that adolescent sneering and insulting of everyone she thinks is so much less than her. Again, the desperation of it would be funny, if she wasn't trying to ruin other people's lives in the process.
The movie does avoid the trite, Hallmark movie-style ending where the career woman realizes she needs to abandon her big city life and return to her hometown to find happiness. But I'm not sure sat the very end whether she's decided she does need to change or not. She's concluded there's no going back to how it was in high school, but she's either decided there's nothing wrong with her as she is, or she's going to actually move forward with her life, rather than trying to recapture past glory. I mean, it ends with her staring at the smashed up front end of her car, which is like that because she kept slamming into a light pole while driving drunk, so I don't know what to take from that. Moment of clarity, or realizing she's fucked things up too much?
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3 comments:
Have you seen Colossal? Aside from the giant monsters smashing Seoul high concept, it's also about a woman going back to her home town and the most surprising thing about it for me was how they developed that side of it. You think it's going to go one way, because of all of these girl-goes-home movies, and it just doesn't. I went in for the high concept and ended up really liking the film because of the other side.
The one with Anne Hathaway, right? I remember hearing about it when it came out, but I can't remember if the reviews were positive or not. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
That's the one. I don't think it made much of a splash as it's neither a blockbuster nor an indie film, it looks like a romantic comedy but it's not, and I'm not sure anyone knew what to do with it.
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