Adventureland

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Apr 1, 2009

LAND OF THE LOST: Jesse Eisenberg is a junior intellectual with a minimum-wage summer job in Greg Mottola's Adventureland.

[ B+ ]

Greg Mottola's follow-up to Superbad asserts the director's independence from Apatow-land, more of a return to the precisely observed character tics of his debut, The Daytrippers, than the raucous and raunchy comedy its marketing suggests. Adventureland is an almost note-perfect coming-of-age tale that captures the purgatory between graduation and adulthood when hormones, hopes and uncertainty collide on what seems like an hourly basis.

Jesse Eisenberg plays a less insufferable version of his Squid and the Whale junior intellectual, forced to accept a gig in the games booths at a local amusement park when his degrees in comparative lit and Renaissance studies offer little help in finding a summer job. There he meets wry Lou Reed-quoting dreamgirl Kristen Stewart, and adolescent complications ensue. There's nothing surprising in the details here — anyone who's seen a teen rom-com in the past 20 years will be able to plot the ups and downs of Eisenberg's relationships and suss out the true character of Ryan Reynolds' cool-guy-with-a-guitar from frame one. How Mottola scores is in making these revelations seem new to his characters, and how their shock resonates in the audience. For anyone forced to work degrading minimum-wage gigs (especially in the '80s), the details are dead-on, from the rambling discussions that result from boredom to the way that customers fade into facelessness, down to that song that seems to play incessantly, every hour on the hour, all summer long. ("Rock Me Amadeus" in this case, though I recall a public pool that seemed to keep Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" on endless loop.) The encroachment of SNL, in the form of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the broadly overplayed husband and wife who run the park, is the one place where the film missteps. But it's all finally bound together by the nostalgic sheen lent by cinematographer Terry Stacey, which even when playing for laughs adds a layer of aching remembrance.

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