The semi-autobiographical story takes place over the pre-recession summer of 1987 in Pittsburgh, where the film’s hero, a recent Oberlin College graduate named James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), finds himself stranded after his plans for a trek across Europe followed by enrollment in graduate school at Columbia’s School of Journalism are nixed by his father’s (Jack Gilpin) recent demotion and his mother’s (Wendie Malick) stern practicality. James is a romantic and a dreamer who is not cut out for existence in the work-a-day world, yet he finds himself desperately in need of gainful employment, which is why he takes a job at the titular amusement park, a decaying relic whose outdated, rusty charms are lost on both the odd array of collegiate and post-collegiate slackers who work there and the less-than-savory clientele it attracts.

James immediately finds a kindred spirit in Joel (Martin Starr), a fellow romantic and intellectual, albeit one with even more inept social skills and a pessimistic outlook that is borne out of his inability to fit into a world that has no place for dark, probing minds such as his (his idea of a romantic gesture following an impromptu make-out session is the presentation of a Gogol paperback). However, James’s real focus is on Em (Kristen Stewart), a pretty, but troubled girl who has a soft spot for James’s sincerity and openness, but who has already built up a flinty exterior that keeps the rest of the world at bay. Much of her anger stems from her weak-willed father having married a social-climbing phony only a year after her mother’s death from cancer, which leads her into meaningless relationships like the one she has with Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the park’s married maintenance man whose legend stems from rumors that he once jammed with Lou Reed.

The best scenes in Adventureland are the ones between James and Em, as they develop a genuine chemistry that is based on their shared sense of dislocation, but is complicated by the fact that they search for rootedness in vastly different ways: His is all cerebral, lost in books that feed his fantasies about the perfect nature of true love, whereas hers is cynical and tough, hiding in potential self-destructiveness. Their romance unfolds in a way that is completely natural--that is, sweet but awkward, moving forward in stutters and stops that Eisenberg and Stewart convey with blessed naturalism that constantly draws our attention to the fragile nature of what they are building together.

Although he has Jonah Hill’s hair and Michael Cera’s discomfort, Eisenberg creates his own character in James, a rare young man whose wears his “scarlet V” of virginity not as shame, but as a quiet badge of honor, albeit one he often has difficulty explaining to others (one of the film’s most endearing moments is when he tries to tell Em why he decided against sex with a former girlfriend after reading Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 57”). For her part, Stewart is excellent as Em, giving depth and a real sense of sadness to the character that is reflective of everything that was missing in her stiff portrayal of a similar character in the teen vampire romance Twilight (2008). This isn’t terribly surprising given that Mottola has a gift for working with actors and treats his characters with generosity, which adds nuance and layers to those who might otherwise come across as one-dimensional (for example, Reynolds’ adulterousness is played as a self-knowing tragic flaw from which James can learn, rather than just a slimy preoccupation on which a subplot spins).

If Adventureland has a fault, is that it is perhaps too self-consciously poignant and gentle, which means that it must have just enough quirky, movie-ish comedy to qualify as something other than two hours of unbridled post-collegiate angst. While Mottola keeps the visual excesses of the late Reagan era in check, he gives us some blatantly comic characters in Bobby (Bill Hader, still wearing his SNL Daniel Day-Lewis parody moustache) and Paulette (Kristen Wiig), the park’s primary operators whose respective overenthusiasm and distracted mumbling make them feel like they stumbled in from another movie. The film’s general looseness makes some of its comedy feel a bit shoehorned, perhaps because Mottola never quite manages to integrate it into the story’s overall rhythms as Zach Braff did so genially in Garden State (2004). Nevertheless, Adventureland works in its own way, with an inherent sweetness and sincerity that gives its modest summertime story a sense of authenticity.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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