Oh, The Adventures of Adulthood

If you’re planning to take a trip to see Adventureland because you figure it’s another installment of Superbad or something, you’ll probably wind up scratching your head. This film is most definitely not teenage hi-jinks and sexual promiscuity in the beer-soaked warmth of the local amusement park. In fact, it’s (almost) anything but.

Jesse Eisenberg plays a young man, recently graduated from Oberlin College in 1987 with a fairly useless degree (Comparative Literature), whose plans for the great wide open involve the so-called “life-changing” sojourn to Europe, and grad school in NYC at Columbia, where he can begin his quest in journalism.

His real-life parents soon get in the way. Money isn’t quite as fluid as once was, and that means he’s going to have to skip Europe, and find summer work back home in Pittsburgh to try to pay for Columbia. His lack of previous employment, and his obvious shitty degree wind him up as a games counter carney at the local amusement park, Adventureland.

Like I said, if you think rampant silly hi-jinks are supposed to spring from this, that doesn’t really happen. Written and directed by Greg Mottola, this is a funny film, but it’s not a laugh-until-you-sweat film about nonsense (or even non-nonsense, really). Instead, it’s a considerably more substantive movie about the travails of waking up to the realities of grown-up life. There’s partying, cavorting, and jokes about such activity (because, yes, after you’ve lived through that shit some, there’s an absurd humour to that stuph), but it’s colored with the twenty-something awakening to the knowledge that they’ll be some consequences the next day (because after you‘ve lived some, there‘s that revelation too). And there’s promiscuity, yes, as well, but with all the hiccups, pain, confusion and emotional pitfalls that inevitably come with in the real-world of love and sex (and to be honest, with all the attempts to hook up going on in the film, not a lot actually winds up happening--but that‘s 1987 for ya, after all).

The movie is studded with an assortment of somewhat “Apatowian” array of burnouts, boneheads and weirdos (I still wish we could get our boy Martin Starr from his days in Freaks and Geeks some bigger and more important roles), along with so-called sex-pots, studs and heroes, but the intriguing thing is that none of the characters very neatly fall into their respective archetypes at all, and while some likeable folx wind up completely unsympathetic, there’s a definite hint in the script that the characters with more damage have more to offer to the rest of the cast. I don’t know if I can get behind that sentiment so thoroughly as its producers, but at least the film isn’t offering a two-dimensional portrait of these people.

And that may be the film’s great strength; the fact that it’s one of the most genuine and honest portrayals of young adulthood that I’ve come across in a while, both in its wanton desire to pursue excess, and in its confused and embittered realization to what’s really in store for us as adulthood creeps up. The last film to be so gratuitously honest about the subject was probably Waiting (and while that film had plenty of flaws, and is generally regarded as just lo-brow smuggling of tasteless humour into as many scenes as it can, it is actually an astonishingly realistic portrayal of life inside the food service industry, and the people who populate said landscape). You won’t fine yourself falling all over yourself with Adventureland, but if you’ve lived past its characters age, you smile and nod knowingly, and if you’re hitting that age, you’ll have something to think about…at least until the next pot cookie hits your plate.