Directed by: Greg Mottola
Written By: Greg Mottola
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Kelsey Ford, & Michael Zegen
Runtime: 107 min
Rating: R
Trailer

The year is 1987. The hair is big, the spandex bright, and, according to writer-director Greg Mottola (Superbad), everyone hates their lives. James (Jesse Eisenberg of The Squid and the Whale) sees his post-college European escapade fall apart when daddy’s downgraded to a lower position at work. That’s 80s-speak for getting fired, in case the bottle of liquor in Pop’s sedan isn’t clue enough. Europe behind him and Columbia’s expensive journalism grad school in front, James reluctantly takes a job at Adventureland, an establishment with the uncanny ability to recruit twenty somethings with nothing better to do than get high and loathe their existences.

Then Em (Kristen Stewart) must be the employee of the month. She has a dead mother, a wig-wearing Stepmom, a stick-in-the-mud dad, and fits of self-hatred whose only cure is basement sex with the park’s resident musician (read: man-whore) Connell (Ryan Reynolds, trying his hardest to be cool), all topped off with days at a dingy theme park run by quick-tempered Bobby (SNL’s Bill Hader) and Paulette (SNL’s Kristen Wiig), who whispers what few funny lines she has. I don’t know whether to blame the boom operator or the Director. I choose the latter.

In fact, it all starts and stops with the name that comes last on the admittedly creative and visually poignant opening credits: Greg Mottola. To call him our generation’s John Hughes is to call Brett Ratner our generation’s Orson Welles. Working from a script allegedly based on his childhood – my condolences, if this is true – Mottola makes summertime about as fun as biting down on a day-old corndog. If you survive the first few scenes of Eisenberg’s eyebrow twitching, shoulder-shrugging performance, you’re in for a real treat: 100 more minutes of the same thing, plus his exploits with Em and the Adventurelanders. They smoke weed, hide inappropriate boners in awkwardly inappropriate ways, muse existentially, and fall in love, fall out of it, and fall in it all over again. Mix in period-specific tunes, music by Yo La Tengo, leg warmers and neon, and you’ve got a coming-of-age hit on your hands, right? Sorry kid, no stuffed duck for you.

The only thing worse than spending summer at Adventureland is watching someone spend summer there. Awkward close-ups and a drab visual style make for an uncomfortable experience, topped only by flat characters and laughably bad dialogue across the board. But thank the spandex gods for Kristen Stewart, who’s never looked better. If the camera doesn’t love the words coming out of her mouth, it sure loves her face and the unguarded angst it expresses. Yet her talent is severely wasted in purposeless scenes and smothered by an uneven, episodic pace. Adventureland feels like an aging stoner’s blurry musings on his childhood, instead of a treatise on the lives we wish we could still live. Maybe Mottola can fire one up and record a DVD commentary explaining just why we should care about his movie and his characters. He should also explain why nothing in his movie is funny. Well, that’s not wholly true – a one-eyed stuffed banana has a star-making appearance worthy of a comedy far superior to this one. Coming off Superbad, an insightful and sweet, albeit raunchy look at teenage homosocial relationships, Mottola shows just how far he can go without the close involvement of the Apatow clan. I suspect you know my answer.

Like the ring you just can’t get around the milk jug, Mottola never fully grasps his characters. They cruise through the narrative without real consequence, at the expense of audience involvement and empathy. Thankfully, summer always ends. James and Em reunite in The Big Apple, life jackets ready to save them from the sea of Yuppies around them. But even now, freed from the constraints of living with the ‘rents, they still seem so sad, so bland. Where are these kids from? Has weed stolen their smiles? Mottola does deserve some credit: for making a feature-length infomercial for the corporate life. Sure, we have to tuck in our shirts and work long hours, but life as a Yuppie can’t be as bad as life at Adventureland, can it? If it is, I finally understand Patrick Bateman. Renting this movie would make me homicidal, too.

Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009