Mavis was a sympathetic character. But Jason Reitman condescends to her.

Reading this message board, I think I'm the only person who really empathises with Mavis as much as I do.

Diablo Cody's writing of this character is complex, exploring what broken dreams and decimated self-esteem of (what she described in an interview as a very ill), quite hard and cruel woman who had experienced the psychological wringer and scrabbled to hold on to her sense of self, to just get through the day, in self-destructive ways.

But Jason Reitman's direction is so damning. What is came down to, for me, was him tut-tutting about her abject personal failure to create a unit of family and friends in the traditional manner, that she's all alone in the world, that she's so pathetic in kind of nasty visual terms. She has a nice apartment (which she doesn't clean), nice clothes (in a wardrobe full of mismatched plastic and cardboard storage from Ikea), a nice car (covered with food stains), can afford the hardware necessary for her career (including a printer, the cartridge of which she spits on to wring the last bit of ink out of), she's clever (but lazily watches the Kardashians). As poorly as Mavis behaved, the director gleefully, visually humiliates for failing at the status quo, for not having her act together as a mature woman pushing 40 ought.

I disagree with him that the ending was unresolved, complex, left up in the air (heh). Paraphrasing an interview Reitman gave about the morning after scene, he laughed that Mavis was like a monster in a horror movie reawakening when the audience thinks she's dead. And even though she feistily stuffs that donut into her mouth, the last image of the movie is of Mavis wearily surveying her wrecked car. Mavis knows the real deal about the mess of her life, and so does Reitman.