Adventureland

Greg Mottola was the director of Superbad, the Citizen Kane of teen comedies, but his latest film, Adventureland, is much closer in feeling to The Daytrippers, his modest art-house film from 1996. Essentially, Adventureland is a mumblecore film in teen-comedy clothing. This may make for a more intelligent experience, but it doesn't bode well for the box-office receipts. At the Saturday matinee I attended, I was one of three patrons in the theater.

Set in 1987 (I really feel old when a year I clearly remember is depicted as being a much more innocent time), the film centers on Jesse Eisenberg as a college graduate who hopes to spend the summer in Europe before heading to Columbia journalism school. His father, though, gets a downgrade in pay, so he scraps the trip and is forced to take a summer job. As a comparative lit major, he's not qualified for much (accept restoring a fresco, he jokes) but is immediately hired manning the game booths at a second-rate amusement park.

He is schooled in how the games are rigged, and warned never to allow anyone to win a "giant-assed panda." He befriends Martin Starr, who is a Russian lit student who fancies Gogol and smokes a briar-wood pipe, and is captivated by Kristen Stewart, a fetching lass of enigmatic beauty. However, she is secretly sleeping with Ryan Reynolds, who is the older maintenance man who has a demi-god status because he supposedly once jammed with Lou Reed.

There's a lot to like in Adventureland, but it took a while to shed my preconceptions based on the television ads. For one thing, the characters played by SNL cast-members Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, as the bosses at the park, are very minor and are hardly worth mentioning (except perhaps for Hader's porn-star mustache). And as I wrote above, the film is not a raucous comedy. There's a lot of pot smoked and alcohol imbibed, but there is no semen in beer (aside from vomit, there are no bodily fluids on prominent display) and only a couple of boner jokes. Instead the mood is almost melancholy, especially from someone with my point of view, who is watching as the dreams of young people are crushed by circumstances beyond their control.

Eisenberg, who played similar characters in Rodger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale, is very good as an intellectual kid trapped in degrading circumstances, as is Starr, who is even more pathetic. Stewart is another story. In some ways she's playing an idealized character, the kind of girl that every young man would pant over, but fortunately Mottola gives her some depth. But Stewart, who was as wooden as oak in Twilight, isn't much more animated here. If in Twilight she ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, in Adventureland she gets up to D or E.

And this leads to a problem I had with the film that tampered my enjoyment of it a great deal--I had trouble hearing everybody. The entire cast of young people (with one exception) seems to have been directed to act with extreme lethargy. Maybe it's all the pot they smoked, but instead I think it's supposed to be some kind of not-give-a-shit cool that may be true to the age but makes for a hard movie to understand. The only kid with any spirit is played by Matt Bush, that kid from the cell phone commercials, who is so wound up he's supposed to be thoroughly obnoxious. That may be true, but at least I could understand what he was saying.