Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009)

When his family’s circumstances force him to rethink his plans for Harvard, college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) has to take a summer job at the local theme park to make up the shortfall.

James forms bonds with the various misfits who keep the park running, including the worldly Connell (Ryan Reynolds) and a young woman in a similar stage of crisis, Em (Kristen Stewart).

As the summer progresses, his relationships with these new friends force James to reconsider his future in very different ways…

I watched Adventureland a few months ago, and have been tinkering with this review ever since.

Revising it after watching Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, I was struck by the parallels. 

If anything, the working class struggles of those earlier films find their echo here - in a film set in the same time period, featuring characters who just a step beyond the Hughes protagonists - they have left high school, but they are still stuck in place.

There has been no great awakening, no greater sense of plan or purpose.

I was a big fan of SuperBad, Motolla’s previous film, and so I was keenly following the production of this film.

From memory I do not think it got a cinema release.

I remember leaving it a little disappointed. I had been expecting SuperBad 2. By that measure, Adventureland never stood a chance.

But despite being completely contrary to my expectations, it stuck with me.

Its sense of melancholy and hopelessness resonated. This film was coming out right in the middle of the financial crisis, which made its characters’ struggle against the materialism of their peers hit even harder.

In the years since Adventureland’s release, Eighties nostalgia has become an industry unto itself. 

It makes Adventureland’s portrayal so refreshing: The period is not treated as a joke or a site for homage. If anything, it is a bleak foreshadowing for every generation to follow in these characters’ footsteps.

John Carpenter once said the eighties never ended, and it is hard to disagree (even in NZ, we are still living with the repercussions of the changes of that decade through our localised version, Rogernomics).

While the decade’s focus on accumulation, on making money, looms over them, the characters in Adventureland find themselves searching for meaning outside of the daily grind.

The cast are uniformly excellent.

Adventureland might feature the best use of Ryan Reynolds.

Cursed with a deadpan wit and good looks, Reynolds either comes off as too smarmy in comedies or too insincere in straight dramatic roles. He is not incapable of delivering a good or great performance (Mississippi Grind is heartbreaking), but few films have caught his innate vacuousness.

This character is a fraud. A cool front hiding a complete lack of character. Reynolds is incredible.

He might be older, but he is also caught in his own kind of arrested development, and seems content to stay there.

This is bragging but I have been a fan of Kristen Stewart before her breakout success in Twilight.

I had seen her in Panic Room around the same time I had seen SuperBad, and I was struck by how unmannered and understated her performance was.

I was not that plugged into actors but Stewart seemed so singular I went looking for her other work. The film that sold me on her was Speak, a quietly devastating TV movie about sexual assault that she had anchored with an understated, though highly literate, emotionally charged performance.

I had kept her on my radar, and ended up going to see Twilight when it opened. While I thought she did a good job, the movie did not hook me - I was glad to see the movie succeed, and hoped it might pave the way for more high-profile gigs in movies featuring witches and huntsmen. 

Adventureland was the movie that confirmed my feelings about Stewart, and I was completely unsurprised by the critical reappraisal she has enjoyed after the Bella-Edward-Jacob fever had died down.

Seemingly more mature and together than her new beau, Em is even more lost than James. What Stewart sells is the tragedy of self-awareness - Em is stuck in a situation she loathes, but she has no idea how to get out of it.

It is a performance that juggles the characters’ contradictions with delicacy and a lack of external signifiers. Em is constantly trying to put on a front of ironic detachment, but Stewart never loses sight of the character’s deepset sense of loneliness.

In the lead, Jesse Eisenberg manages to dodge a familiar archetype (the neurotic intellectual college leaver) - his comic asides feel more like an emotional release, and less targeted for the funny bone.

This quality applies to the film’s tone overall, and was probably a reason why I was not keen on it on my initial viewing - there is no rat-a-tat of banter ala Superbad, and no big setpieces.

Adventureland is quieter, more melancholic and reflective. 

Greg Mottola has had a successful career in the years since (put your hands up for Confess, Fletch!), but I hope gets back to this territory.

A great film.

Related

Starter for 10

Confess, Fletch

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One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

Decades after he went on the run, an ex-radical (Leonardo DiCaprio) finds himself and his daughter (Chase Infiniti) targeted by the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club and their attack dog Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

I was not in a hurry to get this review out. I wanted to take my time with it, and absorb some of the context around it. I had no real angle to write from.

A couple years ago I had a silly idea to do a themed series covering the career of PT Anderson, except I would pretend PT was the same filmmaker as Paul WS Anderson.

This is the movie where it feels like their respective paths could converge. Kind of.

In light of the recent news about the Warner Brothers sale, writing about One Battle After Another gained a new layer of pathos. If this merger goes through, the results will not be good.

In its pieces, this movie has the heart of exploitation cinema: A band of radical women activists hiding out as nuns; Teyana Taylor is styled as an action heroine, complete with - at one point - a massive machine gun.

But all of these elements are surface. What the movie is ultimately about is taking these images of rebellion and revolution and breaking them down, showing the ways in which real change is accomplished without the overt heroics (and implied individualism) the early scenes present - instead it is the less glamorous work, of ongoing interpersonal relationships and community-building, which can cause the most important shifts.

While it is based on a novel (which I have not read) this movie is so primed for 2025 America.

Underneath the action scenes and comedy, there is a throbbing pulse of rage to the movie - a righteous anger at the state of the world, and the foundational sins of the country that still carries so much weight.

 

It did not help that before the screening I had watched the footage of an immigrant woman being tackled by an ICE agent outside a courtroom - a brutal display of state violence. The film’s focus on white supremacy and immigration carried an extra charge.

The film is split into two halves:

In the first half, we follow the revolutionary group Paris 76 in their youth, directly engaging the government (freeing immigrants from a Denton centre; leaving bombs in government buildings; robbing banks).

In the second, we are dropped into the present, as DiCaprio’s “Bob”, paranoid and disillusioned, tries to raise his daughter according to the principles he lived by with his old comrades.

Teyana Taylor, so impressive in Three Thousand and One, is the deceptively solid sun around which the first part of the film orbits.

She is a mythic figure, an archetype of a strong black woman. Highly sexual AND physically imposing, she feels like a descendant of Pam Grier’s action heroines of the seventies.

She seems like the perfect embodiment of the white establishment’s fears and desires - as well as her partners’.

In the early scenes I was a little disconcerted - I thought she was a bit too broad. 

But that image turns out to be a lie - in the end, she is just a human being, as flawed and capable of failure as anyone else.

It is a shocking, brutal reveal. And it plays to the film’s broader focus on the difference between people who play with a belief system, and those who do the work, make the sacrifice to embody it. 

DiCaprio’s Pat/Bob is the positive inverse of his role in Killers of the Flower Moon - whereas that film presented him as an antagonist who is capable of recognising his own moral failings, but too weak to rise above them.

Here he is playing a character who initially tries to be an ally and work against the institutions which are designed for him, but when the film jumps forward in time, he has given that up. The most he will do is performative (offering a (correct) analysis of the US presidents during a parent-teacher meeting).

Ultimately he does not become the film’s hero - and he saves no one. 

As his daughter Charlene, Chase Infiniti is a welcome balance - she spends most of the movie apart from her father, and the actress more than holds her own against heavyweights like Sean Penn and Regina Hall.

Sean Penn’s emotionally stunted, childish soldier is both terrifying and pathetic, while the club he worships are both all-powerful and ridiculous, capable of great damage but unable to quash dissent or destroy the communities they are seeking to eradicate.

It is a performance of tics but it works for a man struggling to find a channel for his own desires - until he finds the perfect avatar in Taylor’s Perfidia.

One performance that has thankfully not gone unnoticed is Regina Hall - as one of Bob/Pat’s comrades who comes to rescue Charlene, she delivers the most understated yet nuanced portrayal in the film. She is almost in a different movie from the more heightened characters around her, yet she also grounds it. 

There is a scene toward the end, where she has to make a choice, which is the most emotionally devastating in the film. And that recognition is delivered purely in her face. It is a fantastic showcase for an actress who seems to be capable of anything (is Scary Movie 6 something I should review?).

This movie earns its 162 min runtime, and it is built for IMAX. The final meeting between Lockjaw and the bounty hunter in the desert is breathtaking.

One of the best movies of the year.

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In The Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967)

Due to bad timing, northern cop Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) happens to be in the southern town of Sparta when a local bigwig is found murdered.

Fingered as the chief suspect because he is black, Tibbs is forced to pair up with Police Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) to solve the mystery.

As they get closer to uncovering the truth, Tibbs and Gillespie find themselves on the wrong side of the town’s regressive power structure - and the police chief is forced to question his own assumptions about his reluctant partner, and the system Gillespie is upholding…

Originally I was planning to review the rest of the Shaft sequels, but I found a copy of this film first. And I was hooked.

I had always avoided In The Heat of the Night because I assumed - like Poitier’s other big hit of 1967, Look Who’s Coming To Dinner, it was more of a heavy-handed drama. Bobbins to that.

In The Heat of the Night is great. Like Shaft, the mystery is just a framework. This is a high-tension thriller with a razor-sharp sense of humour.  

That humour is key - I was reminded of Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! in the way the film layers its examination of prejudice with irony. 

That being said, that earlier film was more overtly farcical. This film shows it is a difficult balance to strike.

Tension and humour operate on the same basic mechanics, but the film has to function with a delicate balance of tones. Lean too comic and the story is robbed of stakes, lean too far the other way and the film could become relentlessly bleak. 

The opening of the film has the structure of a joke. 

It opens with a pair of legs climbing off a train in the middle of the night - a hand is briefly shown. 

We then follow a local deputy (Warren Oates) as he cruises the streets and discovers a dead body. This leads to the introduction of Chief Gillespie, who orders a sweep of the town.

The scene ends where it began, with the deputy finding the unseen stranger sitting at the train station.

Addressing the stranger as ‘Boy’, the deputy draws a gun and arrests him.

Cut to the first shot of Sidney Poitier, sitting on a bench reading a magazine.

It is a fantastic character introduction - made even more impressive by Tibbs coolly following the deputy’s commands. He is clearly unsettled, but he is not going to show the deputy anything - just a cold stare.

Thus is set a fascinating dynamic - once the local cops know who he is, they need Tibbs’ help to solve the case. Neither party wants anything to do with the other - Tibbs was only in town because he has to change trains, and understandably wants nothing to do with the locals’ open hostility towards him.

Violence is not shown, but it is implicit in every interaction he has to endure. Unable to betray his true feelings, Tibbs relies on a subtle wit (his “Right, Chief?” to Gillispie after he explains how to determine the time of death is gold).

It is only when he shows up Gillispie, and makes the racist lawman explode, that he is able to return in kind (cue the iconic “They call me MISTER Tibbs!”).

The film is filled with moments like this, as Tibbs’ investigation - and more importantly, his very presence - gets deeper into the town’s secret underbelly.

The slapping scene remains impactful (no pun intended) because of how long the film has taken to build up to the moment.

The film has stoked such tension over the threat of violence towards our hero that when Tibbs slaps Endicott back, it comes off like an explosion.

Followed by reaction shots of everyone in the scene, it is a cathartic moment that immediately becomes a catalyst for notching up the tension, and the stakes - unwilling to act, Gillespie is now under pressure.  

When Tibbs has another face-off, this time with a lynch mob, Gillespie comes to the rescue.

To the film’s credit, it does not have the Chief affect a total about-face immediately. At this stage, he is ready to help Tibbs, but only so that the northerner leaves town.

Ultimately the solving of the mystery not only forces Gillespie to confront his own prejudice, but the collective hypocrisy of the white townsfolk: 

The white community hides their own deviance and hypocrisy, and while they hate black people they need them - not just Tibbs,but Mama Caleba (Beah Richards), the abortionist.

The film ends with the two lawmen finally on even terms.

Tense, funny and sadly timeless, In The Heat of the Night is a great movie.

Related

The Landlord 

Shaft 

Claudine

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!