Adventureland Review
Greg Mottola's Follow-Up to his Huge Hit Superbad
The American comedy has come a long way since those sticky days right after American Pie and There’s Something About Mary where humor was thought to be derived from the most demented perversions and gross-outs possible, with the genre hitting rock bottom as a recently amputated testicle made its way through a hospital, eventually finding solace in some poor sap’s cafeteria lunch in Tomcats.
But with the help of Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith before him, the sight of a new comedy is no longer cause for scorn but rather for excitement because what is comedy but one of our most powerful psychological tools? It’s a diverse means to compensate, to attack, to shelter, to heal and a way to dig deep and unbury hidden pain that lurks just below the surface.
Adventureland's Comic Approach
Thankfully that’s the approach of Greg Mottola’s new film Adventureland, an uncharacteristically smart and touching comedy about a twentysomething getting by after being forced to bail on his plans to travel Europe and instead accept a summer job at a crummy local amusement park in order to save money for school.
The park is run by husband and wife team Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, both Saturday Night Live alums), and has two rules: 1) no freebies and 2) no one ever wins the big ass pandas.
Bobby keeps a baseball bat in his office in case of irate customers and gets almost perverse pleasure out of providing commentary over the horse race game, and Paulette knows how to compensate when the googeley eye stock for the stuffed banana prizes runs low with one of the films biggest laughs.
All in a Lou Reed T-Shirt
It is here where James (Jesse Eisenberg) has his eye caught by Em (Twilight’s Kristen Stewart). However things are not so simple, as the naive and virginal James fails to see much past Em’s beauty and Lou Reed t-shirt; there seems to be a certain age where everything you need to know about a person is usually plastered on their chest.
Em finds herself equally attracted to James but has been thrown too many curveballs to commit to innocent teenaged romance. Em has never had a relationship with any man she has loved and the one person she did seem to love, her mother, was eaten away by cancer and replaced by a woman who wears a bad wig to hide her natural baldness, a cruel irony that is not lost on Em.
She also secretly has a thing for the older, very married, maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds) who allegedly once jammed with Lou Reed himself. Although it would be easy to write Connell off as a pervert or a miscreant, one gets the sinking suspicion that such legends exist to fill holes in a life that has taken a wrong turn past splendor and down the road of complete and utter uninspiredness.
Finding the Perfect Tone
Mottola finds the perfect tone for which to set all this to, as the film, like the similar-minded Juno, plays more like a character drama that finds humor in the places where it creeps up naturally as opposed to feeling like it’s striving to meet some unspoken comedic quota.
Adventureland vs. Superbad
That’s what separates Adventureland from Mottola’s last film, the much beloved Superbad. Adventureland takes everything that worked about Superbad and melds it into something that is sometimes funny, sometimes touching and sometimes sad, but always at least truthful.
There are no exaggerated comedic personas this time like those pesky cops in Superbad, which was a good film when it wasn’t distracted with being a bad one. Adventureland is grounded in something more real and is more charming because of it.
Adventureland May not be for Everyone
Therefore, the more deliberately paced Adventureland may not sit well with those expecting that constant barrage of profanity that was Superbad, but it will connect with an audience who, like it’s characters, are a bit older and a bit wiser than their years require and who fondly remember those days of working dead-end summer jobs when you’d rather be off reading Melville or Gogol, not wanting to change the world, but prepared to just in case the opportunity were to arise.
Cherishing a Bad Job
Because the truth is, a bad interim job at that age is probably, in the long run, a valuable experience. If James liked his job he’d simply be going through the motions, but a bad job activates the imagination, forces a person to compensate by killing their time in creative ways or falling in love and it’s in these arbitrary spaces in everyday life where the best comedies are born.
James may need to clean up puke every now and then but he also has his eyes opened to the wonders of love, heartbreak, friendship and laughter, the things that inform the rest of our lives.
Mottola's Five Favourite Films
Recently on Rottontomamoes.com Mottola listed his five favourite films among which were Fellini’s 8 ½ and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and, believe it or not, you can see those influences constantly peeking around the corners of Adventureland.
Fellini and Truffaut were men who put their faith in the human spirit and always sought to find it, even in the darkest corners of existence and made some of the most wonderful, life affirming films because of it; films that made a viewer feel good just knowing that someone had enough love left in their hearts to make them.
Adventureland may get slightly bogged down in formula on occasion (especially in the nice but unlikely conclusion) but Greg Mottola puts his faith in many of the same places his idols did. God bless him.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
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