Do not be fooled by the coming attractions or the television commercials, or by the fact that the writer/director Greg Mottola directed Superbad. I incorrectly assumed that Adventureland belonged in a category with the spate of recent funny, but trivial comedies. While Adventureland has some funny moments, this look at a 1987 college graduate’s summer job at an amusement park is understated and smart.

James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) plans to travel through Europe in search of adventure before starting graduate school in New York City, where he hopes to become a writer. When his parents announce after his graduation that they can no longer fund his planned trip or his rent in New York, Brennan is forced to live at home and search for a summer job in his native Pittsburgh. He finds that his degree in literature and limited work experience leave him little choice but to accept a job running the lowly games in Adventureland. During a summer where he works in Adventureland instead of having actual adventures, he encounters lust, love, friendship, violence and boredom. When the summer ends and the park’s manager assumes that he will return to his job, Brennan smiles and shakes his head, knowing he had a more valuable adventure than he planned and is more certain of the direction he wants his life to take.

Adventureland is staffed by a diverse group of employees and Adventureland is full of strong supporting performances. This amusement park is run by Bobby (Bill Hader), a man with a handlebar mustache and a baseball bat in his trailer. Unlike the other park employees who yearn to be elsewhere, Bobby actually likes his job. He threatens rowdy patrons with violence, urges litterers to use the clown trash can and demonstrates calling the horse racing game with a passion and enthusiasm that causes his wife to get misty eyed. Hader, last seen as Seth Rogen’s hilarious cop partner in Superbad, is just as funny here in a similar role. Joel (Martin Starr), Brennan’s co-worker at the games booth, also has some funny lines. (“That was a whole corndog,” he complains to a motorist who throws a whole corndog at him.) Starr’s portrayal of this Jewish and somewhat nerdy intellectual is sympathetic and believable, as he sincerely gives a female co-worker a book by Nikilai Gogol as a romantic overture, and tells Brennan the lore of Lisa P (Margarita Levieva) the attractive girl who runs (and dances at) the Musik Express ride and tantalizes the men. Ryan Reynolds (Definitely, Maybe) brings some wistfulness to the role of Conner, the park maintenance man who assuages his disappointment with his life by hitting on the young female employees and regaling them with stories of his rock and roll life.

Adventureland’s two leads, Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) and the lovely Kristen Stewart (Twilight) turn in refreshingly understated performances. Eisenberg is believably sincere in his scenes with Stewart and the rest of the cast as Brennan makes tentative romantic advances and cannot resist over sharing the details of his sexual failures. His attempts at witticisms while running his horse race game (“Bring your tickets to the window”) with disinterested players (“There’s a window?”) are both amusing and realistic. Stewart brings a dark quality to the role of Em, the NYU student home for the summer who has problems at home and in romance, but is the object of Brennan’s desire. As she did in Twilight, Stewart brings both seriousness and a touch of sadness to her role, as Em mourns the death of her mother by arguing with her father, stepmother and married lover, and implying that she works at Adventureland to annoy her attorney father. These characters are genuinely nice people, and are played by appealing actors, who look and act like real people, and one cannot help but root for them.

What makes Adventureland different from other similar films? Mottola based the film on his own experiences working at the real Adventureland in Long Island (Adventureland was filmed at the Kennywood amusement park in Pittsburgh) in the late eighties. The rides, games and park patrons seem real, as does the eighties atmosphere, helped by a soundtrack that features Crowded House, Lou Reed, Husker Du and more. What also seemed real was the story. There are no bad guys (among the main characters) in this film, just confused and unhappy people who sometimes make bad choices. And unlike other films, the young characters in Adventureland are smart and educated, and enjoy referring to Plato, Virgil and Melville. It is a nice change to see college age students and college graduates, instead of high school students. Unfortunately, in our current economy, educated young people having to work at menial jobs seems contemporary, not nostalgic. Nostalgia for the eighties aside, the writing is clever and the film seems almost too good to be a commercial release. But if Miramax wants to pretend that Adventureland is another teen comedy in order to put bodies in those stadium seats, that is fine with me, as long as they keep making films like this one.

Adventureland. Directed by Greg Mottola. With Jesse Eisenberg (James Brennan), Kristen Stewart (Em), Bill Hader (Bobby), Martin Starr (Joel), Ryan Reynolds (Mike Connell) and Margarita Levieva (Lisa P.).   Miramax Films, 2009.

 

Gail sees a movie appears every Wednesday.

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