Review: Adventureland
Greg Mottola’s “Adventureland,” a coming-of-age romantic comedy in which quirky young misfits populate a wacky amusement park, promises a takeaway that is equally fresh and offbeat. Alas, the film ultimately makes little light of the hackneyed idea of true love.
As the film opens, bright-eyed, mop-headed James (Jesse Eisenberg) is graduating from college, class of ‘87. With a degree in comparative literature under his belt, the intellectual stripling is headed for Columbia University’s journalism program come fall. But first, he gets to live out every young writer’s dream: backpacking Europe for the summer.
Not so fast. When James’ father gets demoted at work, the trip is canceled and James is banished to Hometown, Pennsylvania instead. Apparently baby bird hadn’t poked his head out far from under mommy and daddy’s protective wing. He’s got oodles of literary experience, but James is a virgin to life, love … and labor. With no work history, the best job James manages to land is as a carnival games attendant in the amusement park, Adventureland.
Mottola is at his comical best as he introduces the characters and illustrates the rules by which Adventureland is run. The park staff is an assemblage of freaks and geeks. There’s Pete, who is as excitable as a yappy terrier and has a recurring role of steaming through a scene just long enough to punch James in the nuts. And a dopey-sweet Russian-lit nerd named Joel — he puffs from a 19th century pipe and doesn’t need to be nudged to admit that it may be an “affectation.”
As for the games — course the sick truth is that they’re all rigged (we all knew it). The disks in the ring toss are magnetized to never land on their target, and plastic bowlers are superglued to mannequins, never to be knocked loose no matter how hard one throws.
Simply put, “no one ever wins the big ass panda.”
One gets the sense, though, that though Mottola easily conjures up a cast realer than real life, he doesn’t have much sympathy for them. They’re just weirdoes, and one broody dark-eyed beauty quickly surfaces from the dross. Her name is Em, and she goes to NYU.
One spends half the movie trying to figure out exactly why Em is so angst-ridden. Could it be a turbulent home life? We’re told that Em’s mother died recently, and her father has married an abominable new woman. But the tyrants barely make an appearance in their comfortably furnished single family home. Or is it that Em is having a secret affair with Adventureland’s mechanic, Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a hunky, older married man?
Whatever it is, young love blooms.
But the film sadly disappoints where it matters. James and Em are different from the animals at the carnival. And the film makes brisk business of short-selling cred borrowed from cultural icon Lou Reed. In case the soundtrack is not obvious enough, Em wears an oversized Lou Reed tee, and Connell has only to reprise that ONE time that he jammed with the man to get all the girls.
If these two get together, one would not be surprised if they moved back to the suburbia from which they came.
