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.
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