New review: Adventureland
Adventureland (dir/scr: Greg Mottola)
Adventureland is more than just a chintzy theme park outside of Pittsburg, where college grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) spends a summer trying to save money for graduate school. It’s the real world adventures of life in the space between college and independence, that place where you think that you’re an adult but have yet to live outside of the bubble.
Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart
Greg Mottola’s semi-autobiographical coming of age comedy is as smart and perceptive as they come. It could be Superbad four years later, where the smart kid has embraced college and left his high-school world and identity far behind. College grad James reads poetry for pleasure, has been accepted to post-grad journalism school at Columbia and plans a summer bopping around Europe with his college buddies. Until his parents break the bad news: Dad has been demoted (this is the pre-downsizing generation) and the once upper-middle-class lifestyle loses a prefix. The European summer romp becomes a working vacation and he’s pulled back into the working class environs that he thought he left behind. If he’d given it any thought at all, that is. James hasn’t been all that aware of class and it’s clear that he got through college without a part-time job or work study. He’s unqualified for any job but Adventureland, a rickety park just a few notches above a county fair midway, and he’s sized up immediately by the park manager (Bill Hader, behind a mustache that deserves its own screen credit) as a “games” man, working rigged games in the midway, where “nobody wins a big-ass panda.”
