Adventureland

I’m going to be honest. I thought Adventureland was a different movie than the one I saw this weekend, but I was pleasantly surprised. I signed up for a comedy but what I got was a sharp, angst flick about teenagers coming of age in deadend summer jobs. Written and directed by Greg Mottola, I expected it to be a crazy, raucous comedy like Superbad, one of his earlier films. But that it was not.

Set in the summer of ’87, James Brennan, played by relative newby Jesse Eisenberg gets stuck working a job as a Games operator at an amusement park called Adventureland to pay for Columbia grad school when his father is demoted and can’t afford it any longer. Instead of backpacking through Europe with his buddies, he’s stuck in Pittsburgh with a ton of ungrateful customers and colorful co-workers.

James is a smart, serious yet clueless 20-something, who happened to go through all years of college without losing his virginity. However, this summer things change, mostly because James was gifted with a bag of joints in a place where the employee would rather smoke during and after work than deal with the fact that most of their lives are going nowhere. He, quickly, makes friends with a mixed bag of nuts. James, also, meets Em (Twilight’s Kristen Stewart), who has more problems to deal with than our current President, but she turns out to be James’s ideal woman.

Things get muddy in a atypical since Em is having an affair with the sexy but married, park handyman Mike, played by the always sexy but funny (at least I think so) Ryan Reynolds. The teen angst gets a little angstier, although way more typical, when the hottie of the park Lisa P. begins flirting with James.

There’s your usual crotch hits, sex jokes, lazy behavior and drunken and stoned escapades that you’d expect from a teen movie about those good ole summer days, but there not enough of them to truly make this a comedy. What Mottola really focuses on is the emotions of growing up and figuring out the real world and the mistakes we all make and wish we could take back. What I thought would be raunchy turned out to be a beautiful though predictable retelling of a young Mottola’s life.

I could tell you how the movie would end and that it would be cheesy. And from the moment the characters or Mike and Lisa P. are introduced, you know they are destined to be the large humps in the love between Em and James.

Mottola chooses to get a little more serious when he delves into Em’s destroyed family life and when James’s friend Joel is rejected by a date because he’s Jewish and she’s Catholic, but that’s as far as the serious goes.

What I appreciate is the subtle, low-key acting done by all the actors mentioned above. Never once did I feel like I was watching stereotypes of characters. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are the funniest thing in this movie as the park owners and the youth’s boss, and the flashback to ’80s pop made me want to get up and sing along with the movie.

Should you go see Adventureland though? I’m not so sure I’d pay $10.25 all over again. It did remind me of how I felt after Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, like I was seeing the world through rose tinted glasses, but maybe that’s just what nostalgia for youth does to you. It did remind me to enjoy it while it last, so I guess I got something out of it.

See Jaimie’s review here!