The fact that I enjoyed Adventureland as much as I did is mildly surprising considering that, before even a single frame of the film had unspooled, it already had several strikes against it. First off, the film is clearly at least semi-autobiographical. There’s just no way Greg Mottola would bother telling this story unless something at least a little similar happened to him. When the filmmaker is that close to the story and when the story in question has been romanticized over twenty years of retellings (though I’m only guessing about that last part), there’s a pretty decent chance that the film will be completely self-serving and unsatisfying. Just think of how many awful ‘passion projects’ there’ve been over the years. From Gangs of New York to The Passion of the Christ, the phrase ‘passion project’ is usually just a euphemism for ‘piece of crap’.
Second, Mottola is coming off the wildly successful Superbad. When a director makes a movie that makes as much money as that one did, they’re pretty much handed the keys to the kingdom and told to go make whatever they want. For the most part, however, this turns out very very poorly. Compounding that, Miramax is releasing the film. This is significant just for the fact of it. When a director makes a hit movie for a studio, the studio does everything they can to keep him there (like giving him $150 million to make Watchmen for instance). So the fact that Columbia isn’t releasing Adventureland leads me to believe that they must have passed on the film. And if they passed on it, that pretty much guarantees the film won’t have broad appeal.
Third, Kristen Stewart is the object of the protagonist / filmmaker stand-in’s romantic attention. Before six months ago I actually quite liked Stewart, mostly because all I’d ever seen of her was her work on the screen. Once she started going out and doing interviews to promote Twilight, it became clear that in real life she is either a complete moron, a drug addict or simply unable to carry on a conversation if it hasn’t been scripted for her. That might be a little unfair but if you’ve seen her appearance on Letterman last year, you know I’m not exaggerating.
Yet somehow, despite everything the film seemed to have stacked against it, I really enjoyed it. Some of that enjoyment might be due to the film hitting a couple of my weak spots. I’m as much a sucker for a good coming of age story as a hopeless romantic is for a good rom com. I’m also a sucker for a film with a great soundtrack. And Adventureland deploys The Cure, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie and Yo La Tengo to great effect. And, perhaps most tellingly, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), the ‘hero’ of the film, looks and sounds about the same as I felt when I was about nineteen years old. (In reality I probably looked and sounded a whole lot different but his character is pretty much exactly how I imagined I appeared to the outside world.) Given all of that, it’d be awfully hard for me to resist the film’s charms.
But what’s most admirable about the film is that it unfailingly chooses to be honest and subtle when, given the somewhat ridiculous setting (a cut rate theme park in the late 1980s), it could very easily have gone for the big laugh or the big romantic gesture. Instead, the film is restrained in a way that is both assured and assuring. The viewer knows early on that although some outrageous things might happen in the film, none of them are going to stretch the bounds of believability. And though James might get himself into some embarrassing situations, these will come from a place of emotional honesty. There’s nothing I hate more than cringe-inducing comedy when it’s completely gratuitous (someone serenading his girlfriend in front of her whole apartment building, for instance) or just trying to get the audience to squirm. But when it comes from an emotionally honest place and feels like something an actual human being might do, what could have been embarrassing becomes instead endearing.
Also, Mottola handles the adults in the film in a really appealing way. In a film like this, centered as it is on the lives of young adults, the parents are most often portrayed as little more than cartoon characters. Typically they're either completely oblivious to what their kids are doing or else they’re preaching at them and sounding completely clueless. Either way, the parents in most movies about teenagers have no real influence on the kids, almost as if their very existence is a nuisance. The parents in Adventureland, on the other hand, have a real impact on their kids’ lives, and not necessarily for the better. Though they're trying their best to impart some kind of wisdom to their offspring, the adults in the film are still trying to figure out their own lives and so have precious little insight to impart to their children. Because of that, the kids have no choice but reject their parents and set out on their own. The underlying message of these relationships is that there is no substitute for personal experience. There is nothing any adult can tell a teenager that will really help them figure out what to do with their lives. They have to make their own mistakes and fumble their way through just as their parents have.
That relationship, so hard to get right on film (mostly because the person writing it, whether teenager or parent, usually can’t avoid taking sides), is nothing compared with the difficulty of convincingly depicting two believable characters falling in love. Most of great love stories end in one of two ways: either the couple spends the whole story dancing around each other, finally getting together at the very end (e.g. Pride and Prejudice) or they’re together for a very short time (i.e. before any real issues can set in) and then broken up forever, usually by the death of one or both of them (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, etc.). It’s extremely difficult to portray a romantic relationship on screen that is both realistic and still dramatically satisfying. And to do it with a couple that’s barely entered their twenties is almost unheard of. That’s what elevates Adventureland from just a good coming of age story amongst many into something special.
It helps that Kristen Stewart’s Em is pretty much the idealized woman for every guy who ever was (or thought himself to be) a lonely, awkward, nerdy young man who couldn’t figure out who to be or what to do with his life. Her character, especially in her first few scenes, is a sort of idealized version of ‘the one that got away’, that girl that every smart, introverted, artsy boy was secretly in love with but could never get to notice him. Em is smart, fearless and down to earth but also just a tiny bit damaged and in need of ‘saving’. And though at first that characterization is a little cliché, by the end of the film it’s become clear that there’s a lot more to Em than it first appeared and that the only way she’ll ever be ‘saved’ is if she saves herself. Interestingly, that’s usually the message most films like this send about their hero. The girl is usually the prize he earns for figuring out who he really is. In Adventureland, however, there is the very real sense that both Jesse and Em are going to be better together than they would ever be apart.
To get a sense of how remarkable an achievement Adventureland is, think about some of the more beloved movies of the past that attempt to do something similar (i.e. tell a story about a young couple falling in love). Every one that you can name (Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, Cruel Intentions, The Notebook, etc.), are all completely unrealistic. The emotions that the characters express might convincingly mimic real emotion but the situations are ludicrous, the dialogue is filled with long speeches (usually in some sort of public setting) about how one half of the couple feels about the other and the story itself is unfailingly wrapped up in a neat little bow. Even the ancillary characters in those movies usually get some kind of closure to whatever they were dealing with. None of that strikes me as in any way resembling my experience of reality. Those movies mythologize and romanticize young love in a way that almost completely divorces it from reality.
Adventureland, on the other hand, completely demythologizes and deromanticizes its characters' lives, bringing them down to a human level. There’s just no comparison between the films mentioned above and Adventureland where the characters very rarely say the right thing and often say nothing at all, romantic gestures are small and usually go unnoticed, and pronouncements of undying love are uttered through third parties while extremely stoned. That’s a lot closer to how I remember it being when I was twenty, and Adventureland is that much more powerful (to me at least) because of it.
It’s hard to convincingly portray love on screen for so many reasons, not the least of which being that it doesn’t look exactly the same to any two viewers. What one person sees as a completely realistic depiction of love may look to another like utter nonsense. Thus I can only speak for myself when I say this, but to me Adventureland contains probably the truest rendering of what it feels like to be young and in love with the world supposedly at your feet but seeming instead like it’s spinning completely out of control. It evokes a time and a place and a stage of life with such pitch perfect emotional clarity and honesty that at times I was a little embarrassed by how much it affected me. And any film that can peer that deeply into a viewer’s soul is special indeed.
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