Adventureland – The Geekscape Review

Any writer knows the old adage “write what you know”. If it wasn’t such a sound piece of advice, it would be easily dismissed, but, like many clichés, it exists for a reason. And as much as it works for an individual storyteller, it works magic on a collective audience. With his recent film Adventureland, writer/director Greg Mottola (Superbad, The Daytrippers), gives audiences an accurate portrayal of those lost summers wandering between your adolescence and your years of establishment. Even more poignantly and heartfelt, Mottola really nails the directionless passion that occurs during those fleeting, amorphous times that ended up defining us more than we could ever guess. Everything was magnified and Shakespearean. That crush you let go of was the love of your life. That friend that betrayed you became your sworn enemy. Looking at it now, how could so much of life have gone on while sitting on your ass at a dead end job?

After family economics keep him from being able to spend a summer backpacking through Europe, recent college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) is forced to take a summer job. Ending up at the local run down theme park Adventureland, James soon meets the characters that will define his coming of age summer. There are the exuberant park managers Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), the philosophical game booth worker Joel (Martin Starr), the cool and experienced maintenance man Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds) and of course, the girl that defined that entire summer for James, Em (Kristen Stewart). Upon meeting, James’ inexperience with the opposite sex gives way to curiosity towards Em’s damaged damsel in emotional distress. Suddenly, a dead end summer job doesn’t seem so bad.

Audience members expecting a Superbad helping of laughs will be pretty disappointed in what Adventureland has to offer. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its share of funny scenes. Eisenberg does a good job of being a sympathetic lead who slips now and then into the Ben-Stiller-like, socially oblivious, nice guy that gets run through the ringer trying to get that first kiss. Hader and Wiig deliver what they’re known to deliver as the comic duo running the park and as possible Ghosts of Jobs Future for any employees that dare to stay on past summer. There are bits where the movie relates really funny, possibly biographical, moments about growing up in the mid-80s and working a summer job. But the heart of Adventureland lies in how Mottola and his cast carefully put together a spot on picture of that intense moment in someone’s life. Sadly, the movie spends so much time painting this picture in detail that it suffers nearly fatal pacing issues. As much as I think Adventureland nails the depiction of one of the hardest-yo-define times in someone’s life, it doesn’t give us enough of a compelling story or direction to lead us all the way to the end instead of the exit.

The centerpiece to the drama in Adventureland is Kristen Stewart’s Em. Remember those girls you went after, who may have let you get a kiss or two, who made you work so hard to figure them out in the hopes that maybe you could make them your girlfriend while deep down inside you knew that it was never going to happen? I have a past littered with girls like that. I think most guys hanging out on this site do too and Jesse Eisenberg’s James definitely does. And with Em, James gets closer than any of us did. But still, the problems that she battles behind closed doors keep her just outside of his comfortable reach. The married Mike Connell becomes a more experienced and imposing romantic rival that James has no idea he’s competing with. As she deals with her intensely emotional family issues, Em bounces back and forth, putting our poor hero James through the ringer in the process. They’re going steady, but he never really feels like she’s his.

Surely, we’ve all been there. There are a few women that I’m friends with on Facebook right now who I can hit up on charges of past emotional distress. Looking back at those moments in my life, the girl who worked next door to my first job, the brunette from summer camp, the countless “just friends”, they all seem like silly memories. But when those memories were actual people inciting emotions in me? It was high drama!

I recently went through bins of photographs from my summer camp years. I wrote those kids for months into the fall and winter (maybe even spring!) and they wrote me! I found that I couldn’t recall a single one of their names. The letters and photos ended up in a trash bin. I was briefly hit with sadness at having lost touch with the feelings that those frozen faces had drawn up in me, but without any real relationships to hold on to, keeping mementos around seemed pretty pointless.

With all the time that it takes to get us from Point A to Point B story-wise, Adventureland does do an incredible job of depicting and injecting me without those same strong emotions. As much as I found James to be too much of a gullible doormat to even be likeable at times, I saw so much of myself in the situations he put himself in. As hard as I wanted to deck Mike Connell for knowingly sleeping with “my girl” behind my back, I knew ultimately that he was a nice guy making the wrong decisions out of his own broken self esteem. And as much as I wanted to turn my back on Em and protect myself from her mountain of emotional baggage, I found myself coming right back, more out of a sense of romantic nobility than libido. Em was the real lesson learned that summer. She was the real job that was worth undertaking, and quitting on that erases every lesson learned to that point.

Heavy, right? Not like Superbad, but at times, maybe like the Daytrippers (although it’s been a decade since I saw it at SXSW as a college student). Going in, don’t expect Superbad. Expect almost a group of character studies. Expect to pity, hate and finally relate to almost all of the characters. And yes, expect to have a few laughs here and there.  I think that the film is an accomplishment in some areas and a let down in others. But as much as I’m left with a mixed bag, at least it has some really interesting work going on in it with both the writing and young cast and I know that a simple rehash of Superbad wouldn’t have satisfied me nearly as much.  If you really want to see the film, prepare yourself for a similar experience as you drudge through some of your post-adolescent past while waiting for the laughs to come.  Focusing your enjoyment on the familiar depictions of one individual’s unique experiences over the slapstick humor is a good place to start enjoying this film. With Adventureland, Mottola wrote what he knew. It turns out in the end that we’ve all been there before, for both good and bad.