CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 4/03/09

Midway-Life Crisis

By david michael wharton

Superbad director Greg Mottola returns to writing after 13 years with a sweet, genuine coming-of-age tale that is an ode to both first love and shitty jobs in equal measure.

Adventureland

Greg Mottola (also directed)

After his father takes a crippling pay cut, James Brennan's (Jesse Eisenberg) dreams of a summer in Europe and grad school in the Fall are in serious jeopardy. He soon discovers that a sparse resume and a comparative-literature degree don't count for much when it comes to finding a summer job, so James takes what he can get: a gig running games at a third-tier amusement park called Adventureland. Surrounded by a mix of stoners, burnouts, and overeducated but directionless dreamers, James finds a bright spot in the form of fellow carnie Em (Kristen Stewart). James spends the summer being abused by drunken park patrons, making friends courtesy of a bag of weed left to him by his friend that did get to go to Europe, and taking tentative steps into a first love that might be more than just adolescent infatuation.

Adventureland is a rare bird in the age of rampant, raunchy teen sex comedies, a coming-of-age tale about kids trying to find themselves and their future that's more interested in character than in gross-out gags or titillation aimed at filling out an unrated DVD release. Even the subplot about James' virginity is used as just another insightful aspect of who he is, and while sex is an important part of the overall tableau, it's never an overblown obsession in the vein of American Pie or its many imitators. Sure, it's more or less a given that James and Em will have a third-act confrontation followed by a reconciliation capped with a love scene—I mean, when was the last time you saw a coming-of-age film where the protagonist both started and ended the movie as a virgin? Crucially, however, Mottola's script ensures that when that time rolls around, we're far more invested in the two of them finding peace and meaning in each other than we are in James finally getting some.

Part of the reason for Adventureland's less hyper, less hormonal nature is because this is a film about young people that isn't actually aimed at young people. Like last year's excellent Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, Adventureland can be best appreciated through the lens of nostalgia. The film's 1987 setting isn't just designed to get laughs out of big hair and shoulder pads, but to provide an archetypal "before" on which to hang the reminiscences of everyone who has survived first loves and shitty jobs and wondering what the hell to do with your life. That being said, a recurring joke about the park's incessant playing of Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" is one of the best gags at the expense of the time period, not to mention a bonding moment for anyone who's ever worked somewhere where canned, looped music plays day after day after day…

James, Em, and the surrounding cast of characters are all given moments to shine, never relegated solely to propping up one-liners or sight gags. Mottola trusts his audience and his actors to be smart, and doesn't feel the need to explain everything when implication will do the trick, as when James gets busted by his parents for drunkenly crashing their car through a neighbor's rhododendrons. James found the booze in question on the floorboards of his dad's car, and the quiet look between James and his father says more than pages of dialogue ever could.

James, too, is a protagonist refreshingly free of the standard-issue teen comedy tropes and ticks. He's awkward, but he's believably awkward. He reads poetry because he enjoys it and finds truth in it, not because it's a shortcut to making us believe he's sensitive. When he crashes his parents' car, that act is firmly rooted in everything that has happened before that point. When James and Em hit their darkest moment at the end of the second act, what drives a wedge between them isn't some comical misunderstanding, but the fallout of their choices and the weight of their flaws. Their romance is filled with small embarrassments and missteps, but those moments are never played for cheap laughs. They're just there because, well, that's what first love is like. For a true appreciation of just how noteworthy an accomplishment that is, compare Kristen Stewart's role here to her protagonist in Twilight. And then if you want a good cry, compare the box office between the two films in a few weeks.

Adventureland
Miramax
Rated R; 106 min.

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David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. Being the incurable romantic that he is, he's already planning a double-feature of Adventureland and Nick and Nora once the DVD is out.



Adventureland courtesy Miramax

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