01.01.70

On-the-nose), announcing the nativity of his first child, she impulsively decides to drive back to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota (see?) to win him back. She's convinced he's fading fast of quiet small-town desperation, so here she is, the still-hot city girl roaring back into borough to the rescue. That is the fairly low-concept setup for this rueful dark comedy, a not-so-unfledged woman headed on a misguided journey to reclaim past veneration. 

When Mavis arrives in Mercury, pulling her cherry red but dusty Mini Cooper into the parking lot of a Hampton Inn (faultless), she isn't entirely sure how to go about her plan. So she simply gives Buddy (Patrick Wilson, in full doof procedure) a call, telling him she's in town for "a real estate fixation" and that she's busy but if he'd be up for a drink she'd be exultant to make time. They make a plan for the next day. Mavis is giddy, and to obsolete the time until the fated reunion, she bellies up to a local bar and winds up knocking a few back with a forgotten classmate named Matt (Patton Oswalt), a guy whose chief leading school identity, beyond being an invisible nerd, is that back in school he was badly beaten with a crowbar by a spray of jocks who thought he was gay. The beating left him walking with a cane and, uh, dealing with a mangled penis. (That, along with the sell out "Oh, you're the hate crime kid!", is one of Cody's cheaper, cruder jokes in this film, one whose core is thoughtful enough to make such cartoonishness unnecessary.) The two have a strange camaraderie and, drunk in the parking lot, Mavis confesses her secret plan to Matt, who is justifiably horrified. Buddy is peaceably married with a new baby, part of a sacrosanct unit, Matt insists. But Mavis doesn't fancy, she's still convinced he's miserable. I mean, she would be miserable, upper? So why wouldn't he?

Source: The Atlantic Wire