Adventureland
IMDb is full of surprises today. Smaller movies are always interesting to research to see where the creators are coming from. Writer/director Greg Mottola was also the director of the vastly superior Superbad, and even three episodes of Arrested Development (and the Squid and the Whale). Quite a range of flavors. This one comes down more in Squid territory. While there is nothing technically wrong with Adventureland, it was simply a movie about which I can generate no real emotion. An earnest but somewhat naïve college graduate (Jesse Eisenberg) has his trip to Europe and subsequent grad school plans derailed by unexpected financial difficulties, and gets a pretty low-neuron-requirement job at Pittsburgh’s local fun park, Adventureland. Non-adventures ensue.
Set in 1987, (also when I graduated high school, actually), the film reminds us of a time when these fun parks were still viable entertainment options for a summer’s day – midway rip-off games and barf-inducing rides and dubious “houses of horror” all. They were still fun enough to be diverting, and independently owned and operated rather than enormous corporate monsters, but also just beginning to feel lame enough to enjoy ironically as well. It’s the tipping point before arcades started closing and home computers and video game consoles became more mainstream – in other words, the end of the era of kids hanging out outside the house, no matter how questionable the fun might have been.
The types of folks who worked at these parks either couldn’t or wouldn’t get any other kind of job – it was the Slacker awakening back then, kids spoiled soft by the Reagan era if their parents fared well, or used to making do with nothing if their parents did not. Both groups were unwilling to extend themselves to any ambitious goal. Eisenberg finds himself with a crowd of non-intellectuals who prove themselves to be more real to him than his ostensible best friends. Their seedy and unwilling camaraderie grows as we get to know the characters, and the tone of the movie is set in the ambling lazy tone of their lacks of ambition. They have hidden agendas, but no real endgame plan. Eisenberg is book smart but not so much real-world smart, and this “slumming” is a gift.
Requisite fantasy girl Kristen Stewart, older cooler guy Ryan Reynolds, tease sexpot Margarita Levieva, and hapless sad sack Martin Starr comprise the main staff of Adventureland, run by Bill Heder and Kristin Wiig. Heder and Wiig deserve their own movie as a couple – they have a charming balance of disdain for and desperation for their customers, and as career carnies, just look at life differently. Needless to say, among the worker bees, we get romantic entanglements, misunderstandings, some macho posturing, and some vulnerabilities exposed along the way. The movie ebbs and flows with interest, rejection, desire, repelling, but even the drama you know the characters are feeling, which we have all experienced some of, doesn’t quite leap off the screen. Adventureland as a film never really takes off – some things are resolved, other things happen that make things change, but it always has this vague sense of only being exposition and pretty soon the movie will begin. It’s hard to imagine this delicate, gentle paean to the simpler days of teen entertainment coming from the guy who gave us McLovin, but there it is.
It’s worth seeing, but not worth heaps of your money. Maybe full price in 1987 dollars…
MPAA Rating R-language, drug use, sexual references
Release date 4/3/09
Time in minutes 106
Director Greg Mottola
Studio Miramax
