Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

"Young Adult," "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin" focus on emotionally traumatized characters

Charlize Theron plays one of the more memorable cinematic ne’er do wells of recent memory in Jason Reitman’s acerbic “Young Adult.”

Advertising for the picture may lead you to believe that this one of those types of films during which a flawed character achieves some sort of redemption. Ha!

In the film, Theron plays Mavis Gary, a former high school beauty queen who writes teen novels of the “Sweet Valley High” sort and drinks away most of her evenings.

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She receives an email invitation from her high school boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), to a party celebrating the birth of his daughter.

Mavis deludes herself into thinking that Buddy’s invite is a call for help and that his newborn baby should have been hers.

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She packs up the car and heads to her small Minnesotan hometown, where she not only runs into Buddy, but also Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), an outcast who has become known as the “hate crime guy” after being left to walk on a crutch following an attack by some jocks who mistakenly thought he was gay.

Mavis’s plan may be to break up Buddy’s marriage, but it’s her budding friendship with Matt, who operates a microbrewery from his mother’s basement, that is at the heart of the movie.

“Young Adult” is the second collaboration between director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody. Their first film, “Juno,” aimed more for charm, but their latest heads into much darker territory.

In fact, Mavis is difficult to like for much of the film. But Reitman and Cody still manage to humanize her, especially through the bewildered and disappointed looks and words of advice she receives from her family and friends.

The picture is a showcase for Theron, who is able to disappear completely in the role, and Oswalt, whose character has also become trapped in the vortex of his high school years.

“Young Adult” may not reach the heights of Reitman’s previous film, “Up in the Air,” but it manages to squeeze some uncomfortable laughs from its scenario, which often rings sadly true.

Theron’s bitter writer is not the only character this weekend reflecting on the past.

Imagine being George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a former spy who left The Circus disgraced after his boss and mentor, Control (John Hurt), orchestrated a failed attempt to gather information on a Russian mole within the organization during a trip to Hungary that left a field agent (Mark Strong) dead.

In Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Smiley is called back to the agency to root out the mole after Control dies. The suspects include The Circus’s top brass: Percy Allelline (Toby Jones), who has taken over as leader following Control’s death, as well as Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) and Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds).

Alfredson captures the bleak aura of le Carre’s 1973 story through muted colors and by filming most of its conversations in dark, isolated rooms where the picture’s characters relay their secrets.

The film’s biggest hurdle is that its labyrinthine story’s numerous plot twists are mostly divulged through glances and suggestions. In fact, you may not even realize the presence of a devastating relationship between two characters – one of whom is unseen during the film – until you’ve had a chance to review the proceedings after the movie has culminated.

Alfredson, who directed the beautifully chilly vampire film “Let the Right One In,” is a director to watch. “Tinker” may not be the film to catapult him into the spotlight, but it’s a solid slow burn spy procedural.

Lynne Ramsay’s controversial and taut “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is the week’s best film and it also contains its most distraught character.

The film, based on Lionel Shriver’s novel, poses a provocative question: How much can parents be held responsible for their children’s actions?

In the picture, a terrific Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian, a travel writer who is forced to put her career plans on hold when she becomes pregnant.

From the start, Eva is unsure of her feelings toward her son, Kevin, especially during a sequence in which the infant’s cries drown out drilling on a city street and, later, as he becomes a defiant boy who refuses to learn the games his mother attempts to teach him.

Eva’s husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), brushes off concerns that there is “something wrong” with the kid. “He’s just a sweet little boy,” he tells her.

But Eva and the audience soon begin to doubt this assessment. Ramsay’s thriller does not approach Kevin’s malevolence in a supernatural manner. He’s not Rosemary’s baby or any such thing, but possibly a sociopath.

Is he attempting to gain his mother’s attention when he splatters paint all over the nursery where his newborn sister will sleep? And is he at fault later when his sister is disfigured in a horrible accident?

It is no secret that the film ends with a school shooting orchestrated by Kevin. It’s a key element of both the novel and film that is referenced early in the story.

Ramsay, who has made two hypnotic Scottish films – “Ratcatcher” and “Morvern Callar,” uses the film’s key sequence not as a plot twist, but rather a focal point around which to center its questions of nature versus nurture.

Eva’s tortured character is left to live with her own guilt and the destruction of her family as well as angry confrontations with her town’s denizens as the result of her son’s actions. But how much is she to blame? The picture does not attempt to provide answers, but poses some unsettling questions.

Related Topics: Charlize Theron, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Firth, Film, Gary Oldman, Jason Reitman, John C. Reilly, John Le Carre, Lionel Shriver, and john hurt


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