It is a truth of being 20-something that if you have a crappy summer job, the best way to take your mind off of it is to befriend the other 20-somethings who hate it there just as much as you do. You are trapped there together, 8 to 10 hours a day for three months, right? So what else is there to do? Even in a film set in 1990, like 2009’s Adventureland, this is all too relatable if you’ve had a summer job.
Take our protagonist – 22-year-old music and book nerd James (Jesse Eisenberg), whose only real friends are fellow nerds and tenured college faculty. Here he is, graduated from Oberlin with an English Lit degree and set to move to New York for grad school at Columbia. Unfortunately, his dad loses his job and he is forced to take a job at a run-down amusement park 10 minutes away from his home in the Pittsburgh area – the titular Adventureland. All of the rides in this park look like rejected Six Flags rides, all the games are rigged, and even the prizes look secondhand. His job as an Adventureland worker is to encourage customers with even less luck than himself to throw baseballs at glued targets with hopes of winning prizes. Additionally, as Bobby (Bill Hader), the park’s manager, explains, “no one ever wins the big-ass pandas.”
Director Greg Mottola, known for breaking into the mainstream with Superbad and making a few other absurdly fun hits like Paul and Keeping Up With the Joneses, is here with a much sweeter story. Adventureland is more quietly funny than his other films – jokes about Lou Reed, bar bands, Herman Melville, and girls “not getting” Isaac Asimov (a blatant lie, as sci-fi is for everyone) prove that Mottola is able to be specific with character personalities while evoking laughs at the same time. This is the centerpiece of Adventureland – James is out of his element with his refined tastes, and Bobby has to coach him and the rest of the staff into false enthusiasm.
The park has its own wonderful cast of employees. Sarcastic sci-fi nerd Joel (Martin Starr), James’ first friend that he makes in the park, is responsible for a lot of the film’s funniest dialogue – a Penn State student studying Russian Literature, he believes that his degree will get him a career as a “cabbie, hot-dog vendor, or marijuana delivery guy” and is determined to make whatever impact he can on his communities because of that. He just wants to do what makes him happy. Like Joel, most of the guys are crushing on Lisa P. (Margarita Leviva), an airheaded college grad with a rich lawyer dad. James, however, is much more interested in Emily (Kristen Stewart) – a snarky, quirky NYU student who is seems more mature than the rest. A quick rapport between them springs up, despite her being more sexually experienced than him. They are able to talk deeply about subjects that require more than one sentence – something he lacks in the rest of his friends there. This romance takes fragile bloom while Mottola, also the screenwriter, rotates through a plot involving James’ friends, one of whom, Tommy (Matt Bush), expresses his devotion by hitting him in the balls every time he sees him. The film cuts often to Bobby and his wife Paulette (Kristen Wiig), who are lovebirds and have firm ideas about how every job at the park should be performed, which doesn’t endear them to the employees because they’re usually right. Oh, and then there’s Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the good-looking maintenance man, who is also pining for Emily’s affection despite his dark secrets.
On a personal level, James is an extremely relatable character. As the same kind of lit-major honor student overthinking about the future, obsessed with music and finding camaraderie with teachers, James feels all too familiar. His anxiety to stay in similar communities yet befriend people different from him and his academic ambitions and reluctance to do anything else is where he finds enthusiasm, but none of it has prepared him for the real world, as he has rarely been interested in anything else. James’ lack of job skills and inability to financially support himself are portrayed in an extremely relatable way by Eisenberg on the screen and Mottola in the script, and while a playful and comedic display of the theme, it is still the authenticity that pushes it beyond the typical coming-of-age story. If anything, Adventureland is more like Booksmart than Superbad, which it is often compared to, is. James is like a combination of Kaitlyn Dever’s Amy and Beanie Feldstein’s Molly – a faux-intellectual with hardcore FOMO like Molly who just wants to be accepted for who he is like Amy. And like Booksmart, James’ experiences are guided by the people around him without singling him out for who he is, which helps him gather courage and commitments despite his “useless” degree. Even Joel, who appears in random places to offer James strange but useful advice, seems to be a precursor to Billie Lourd’s Gina doing the exact same thing.
On top of everything else, the supporting cast is as dedicated as Eisenberg. Kristen Stewart is fantastic as Emily, a deconstruction of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope used far too often in romantic films – she’s much more tragic than the typical MPDG, adding a more human dimension, yet she still has the rambunctious fun that similar characters are used to having. Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are hilarious as always. And then there’s Martin Starr as Joel. Compared to everyone else, he is on a whole other level. He steals the show with his top-tier backtalk and his sliding scale of deadpan to over-the-top as a self-hating, cigar-smoking, Isaac Asimov and Fyodor Dostoevsky-loving nerd. As small as some of these characters are, they truly enrich the larger narrative of the film through James’ interactions with them.
While it seems to be nothing more than a “slightly later coming-of-age story,” as Roger Ebert explains, at face value, Adventureland is a wonderful film that’s much more emotionally relatable than it seems. It offers both fantastic, although specific humor, and a deep dive into the anxiety and of college students, with a willingness to be honest despite its humor. I concur that it is truly a beautiful adventure.
5/5 STARS