Adult children

By almost any measure, it is clear that Americans aren’t growing up the way they used to. There are the statistics—only 20 percent of people ages 18-29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960. Thirty-six percent of young adults ages 18-31 currently live at home, the highest rate in more than four decades. The vast majority of them say they’re happy doing so.

Then there’s the economy. Millennials are more educated than any previous generation, yet they have the highest unemployment rate of the last 40 years. And of course, there’s the evidence of politics, i.e., the most popular feature of the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act is letting 26-year-old children stay on their parents’ health insurance.

Given these trends, it’s surprising that more movies like Laggies, a seriocomic look at our society’s endemic fear of embracing adulthood, haven’t been flooding theaters.

Keira Knightley plays Megan, a 28-year-old with a graduate degree in counseling who works a minimum wage job twirling signs for her father’s tax business. She lives with her boyfriend but still views her parents’ house as her real home and reacts with irritation whenever anyone suggests she seek career guidance. Her Peter Pan syndrome comes to a head when said boyfriend proposes at a friend’s cheesy wedding. Megan bolts and winds up spending a week drinking and slumber partying with a 16-year-old acquaintance (Chloe Moretz).

While the setup has a few funny moments and is well-acted by Knightley and Moretz, as well as by Sam Rockwell who plays Moretz’s father, it winds up indulging the very delusions that a good (not to mention realistic) script would puncture.

Rated R for language and non-nude sex scenes, Laggies falls flat because it has nothing honest to say about a culture that in many ways celebrates and encourages arrested development. Instead, nearly all the jokes reflect agreement with Megan that marriage is lame, high school was more fun than adulthood, and the path to true happiness comes from romantic attachment unencumbered by commitment. The movie’s implausible fairy-tale resolution feels shallow and cheap because its understanding of the problem it’s exploring is shallow and cheap.

By contrast, consider the 2011 Jason Reitman movie, Young Adult. Written by Diablo Cody (Juno), the black comedy follows Mavis (Charlize Theron), a hip, beautiful alcoholic in her early 30s who’s tragically ignorant about how to pursue a meaningful grown-up life. Sad, superficial, and lonely, she tries to reconnect with her high-school flame. Unfortunately for Mavis, he has grown up. His life in a suburb, working a middle-class job, with a wife and new baby may look like a trap to his former girlfriend; but as the movie makes clear, that’s because she’s too immature to recognize what truly brings us joy, if not always a lot of free time and convenience.

Nothing about the sex scenes that, along with language, give Young Adult an R rating comes across as titillating. Rather they are pathetic, heartbreaking even, in their depiction of a young woman desperate to find a firm foundation to build her life on but lacking the emotional or psychological wisdom to do so.

What Young Adult got that both the Judd Apatow slacker rom-coms and Laggies miss is that arrested adolescence isn’t just a question of laziness, too much pot-smoking, or an unwillingness to settle on a single career or spouse option. Writ large across a culture, it is the manifestation of a deformed mindset that discounts the greatest common blessings God created for human happiness: marriage, children, and a self-supporting household—a family. A family of your own that comes as a result of leaving and cleaving, that is, not clinging to the remnants of a childhood that, like a favorite old high-school T-shirt, you have long since outgrown.