Young Adam

I don't think I know anyone else who has seen this film. I've seen Young Adam twice, once when I rented it a few years ago, the other time just because it was on late night TV, about a month ago. It's one of those movies that lingers in your mind even though its overall quality is debatable. What meager attention it garnered in 2003 was chiefly due to the graphic sex on screen.

And yes, there is a bunch of sex, and as usual the controversy surrounding it is out of proportion, but there's also something else to this film, something that keeps coming back to me, and for some reason, the other day, it came back to me again. Young Adam is not a great film, but it is a bracing contrast to most Hollywood films.

There is an offshoot of the music website Stereogum devoted to movies called Videogum (I know this seems apropos of nothing, but bear with me), which has a rather hilarious running segment about The Worst Movies of All Time. I was reading through it the other day and it struck me that most of the non-action/adveture films they skewer have similar faults. They're pompous, ham-handed melodramas about Big Issues and Characters Coming To Terms With Things that suffer extreme cognitive dissonance when it comes to recognizing their own pomposity. Just to throw out a few names : Dan In Real Life, Elizabethtown, Crash (the non-sex-with-cars one).

You get the drift. They're movies whose only purpose is to deliver an obvious and facile "message", usually along the lines of "racism is damaging" or "everybody needs love." The characters in these movies only exist to further the message, and that usually makes them horrible stereotypes lacking in all dimension. But of course the filmmakers think they've given the characters dimension, but it's usually manifested through ridiculous and meaningless detail (I'm into exercise), lazy job-oriented shorthand (I'm a cop), or cruel and obvious twists of fate (My dad just died). These are characters who explain their own motivations to their fellow characters, and by exension to the audience.

Which brings us to a key area where Young Adam diverges from conventional tropes. Ewan McGregor's character, Joe, engages in a lot of questionable behavior, eventually with catastrophic consequences - for someone else. But the film takes a decidedly neutral moral point of view, presenting Joe's actions as matter-of-factly as possible. The entire essence of Joe's character is distance. As he keeps a distance between himself and everyone else, so too does the film keep its distance from the audience.

I think what's most remarkable about Young Adam is that because it leaves the moral compass entirely in the hands of the viewer, it exposes how frequently other films offer pat and tidy answers. As I said before, Young Adam isn't a great film, but it leaves an unsettling impression, which is more than you can say for a lot of films.