We're celebrating Charlize Theron before Atomic Blonde opens this week! Here's Chris Feil's weekly series on music in the movies...
Young Adult begins with a near ten minute stretch of almost silence before its recurring song choice bursts in and becomes one of the film’s most illuminating crutches of its antihero Mavis Gary, played with utter genius by Charlize Theron.
At the news that her high school sweetheart Buddy is a new father, Mavis departs her depressing life on a cringe-inducing quest to win him back, armed with tunes from their love that she keeps in a memory box in her closet. The keepsake mixtape “Mad Love, Buddy” begins with “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub, quite the apropos band name for Mavis’s frozen disposition. After several instant rewinds it becomes clear this isn’t just a favorite road trip singalong, but the one she remembers Buddy by. Their song.
It’s a very specific song choice for her to idolize. It dates Mavis and Buddy’s high school days to early 90s grunge, but is a far cry from the majors of the era. That forgotten track air lends a singularity to Mavis’s POV on that relationship - rarified and all hers, of a distant era but not ringing up the cozy familiarity of a lingering hit. It’s about as genuinely affectionate as Theron ever plays Mavis, but as usual she’s stuck on a loop. If her dingy apartment and dissociate attitude didn’t already make it clear, her refuge in the song tells us that her vantage on Buddy lacks honesty and clarity.
The opening sequence intersperses shots of the neon cassette wheeling out the song, marking a clear distinction between warm nostalgia and the kind of willful displacement that Mavis experiences. We see the music, and therefore the time period, quite differently - we jam along semi-ironically but she’s dead serious. She’s still living it, unaware of the cassette’s contemporary silliness or that the song she sings along to is relatively unfamiliar. I guess we all have our favorites.
Initially, the sequence subtly reminds of how director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody used music to establish their point of view in Juno. But here this musicality does more heavy lifting than projecting tone, it creates that distance between character action and narrative perspective. Like the rest of the film, the sequence strikes a tricky balance of comedy and unflinching character insight. Tough but not mean-spirited.
When Mavis joins Buddy to see his wife Beth’s band, they dedicate a flimsy cover of “The Concept” to him. Theron instantly shrouds Mavis in the kind of glare we’re accustomed to seeing on her before she dispatches a room of bad guys. The performance by Nipple Confusion (great band name!) is the antithesis of Mavis’s earnest singing in her grubby car. They actually are fun, not taking themselves too seriously, and the song doesn’t carry nearly the same weight for them. Beth is in the back on drums, so it has to doubly grate on Mavis that Beth isn’t even the star yet Buddy stares on adoringly.
For Mavis, it feels like more than an invasion of her memories, but almost an invasion of her personal headspace. This thing she had ascribed to the relationship she idealized is suddenly a reflection of the lies she tells herself. Maybe the song was more Buddy’s than “theirs”.
Previous Soundtracking Favorites:
A Mighty Wind
Drive
Big Little Lies
Best Worst Thing...
American Honey
but all installments can be found here!