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USA 2009
Directed by
Greg Mottola
110 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Andrew Lee
3.5 stars

Adventureland

Synopsis: James (Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated college and about to go on a trip around Europe, a graduation gift from his parents. Unfortunately, James’s father has had his job downscaled, meaning there’s no money for the trip, or even to help him go to grad school. So, with no real work experience, he ends up working at a theme park called Adventureland. There he meets Em (Kristen Stewart), and a rocky romance begins.

Greg Mottola’s previous film, Superbad (2007) was about teenagers looking for sex and despite its outlandish situations it had, for its genre, an unusually warm and kind tone. Adventureland is in some ways a sequel.

A very offbeat coming-of-age tale, Adventureland is what happens when you leave school behind but haven’t quite come to terms with being an adult yet. It’s a beautiful depiction of awkwardness, childishness and a slow struggle towards growing up and owning your own life.

The film is surprisingly tender in the way it approaches its characters. It would have been easy to demonize some of them, especially Ryan Reynold’s Connell, the theme park maintenance man. He’s older, married, and knows enough about that stage of life to effectively take advantage of it. But what could have been nothing more than a jerk isn’t played that way. Connell has the confidence of both James and Em, and while he’s having an affair with Em, he’s not particularly nasty towards James. He even offers James advice, that, whilst self-serving, is also pretty much an honest statement of his world-view. The choice to not make him an overt villain, but to treat him with a little more subtlety, is symptomatic of the whole film. This isn’t a broad comedy about the difficulties of growing up, it’s smarter and more honest than that.

The end of Superbad had a strange and slightly mournful feeling, of one stage of life ending and a new one beginning. That tone carries through the whole of Adventureland. Yet it’s still a comedy, Bill Hader’s turn as the park owner is hysterical, and there’s plenty of laughs, but it’s a film of substance, a film very much in the John Hughes vein. Here’s hoping Mottola gets to make one more film and manage a kind of thematic trilogy about growing up. He’s got a keen eye for humanity and a very engaging sense of humour. I’m already looking forward to whatever he does next.

 

 

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