Adventureland

I didn’t really know what this movie was about. I just knew it had gotten some nice reviews, and that my friend Nancy, who has very trustworthy taste, had actually read them—and wanted to see it. (Apologies to Nancy for seeing it without her.)

In truth, I’m not very good at the what’s-it-about question—with regard to movies OR books. Generally I enjoy the ride, and then puzzle over what it all means, later. Sometimes I just savor a few seconds or minutes of them, over-and-over again, and forget about worrying over the big picture.

After I saw Doubt, for example, what kept coming back to me was not so much thoughts about the nature of doubt itself (though this was clearly the intention of the movie), but a 20 second or so scene in which the kids are learning to dance in the school gymnasium, and Amy Adams is sitting in a chair on the side, clapping awkwardly. She clapped the way my mom might clap if she were watching me do something I was enjoying, even though she’d never want to try it herself. There’s something so piercingly right and true about those moments. And I felt it again and again in that movie. Does the total movie add up to the greatness of those few moments here and there? I don’t know yet. I’m still enjoying the moments. Haven’t totally gotten to the big picture yet.

That’s sort of where I am with Adventureland right now, too.

It’s 1987. James Brennan, a nerdy but sweet kid with annoying hair (a shelf of bang-curls…were the eighties really that egregious?) is graduating from college and making his plans. He’s going to travel in Europe for the summer with his best friend, then go to journalism school at Columbia.

That’s the plan, at least, until graduation weekend, when his bitchy mom and passive-aggressive dad inform him that his dad’s been demoted and plans have changed. If he’s going to make it to journalism school, he’s going to have to kiss the summer in Europe goodbye and get a job to earn his keep in the fall.

This is one of those movies where the parents are kind of set up as oblivious assholes—the kind who don’t realize that fair’s fair and a deal’s a deal. (The kid only needs 200 bucks to make Europe happen, and it was his graduation gift, for God’s sake.) Other parents are similarly dim-witted or incapable of handling situations with their kids fairly. It reminded me of Peanuts, where we see Charlie Brown and his buddies tangling with painful kid issues (and a few existential ones), while the parents are notably absent or prattling nonsensically in the background.

At any rate, James gets home, only to discover that his nerdy intellectual resume doesn’t get him far. The only job he can get is at a kind of embarrassing local theme park, run by a husband and wife team, Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), who met while Bobby was running the horse-racing game. The interview consists of him asking for the job. Five seconds later, he’s handed a “Games” t-shirt, because Bobby and Paulette proclaim him "definitely" a games guy, not a ride guy, and he’s good to go.

It’s at this point where we meet the freaks and geeks who will people his summer—and the next hour-and-a-half or so of our time. A friend of mine wanted to know if this was a movie about intellectual slackers. Not really. James and a few others are there because they simply can’t get jobs elsewhere and they need the money. Other vacillate between attractive enough but not distinguishable in any other way, or dim-witted, or stuck. It’s a pretty good cross-section of humanity, albeit one within a certain age-range.

And I suppose you could say it’s a growing up movie, which normally wouldn’t appeal to me, except that the lesson learned here is one I wish I’d learn at the tender age of 21: You can’t just avoid the people you fuck up with. I’m not sure I’m quoting that correctly, but I love it. Because we all fuck up, so if you start the avoiding game, you’re going to run out of people to hang with, or need a constant supply of new friends and lovers, on a pretty regular basis.

I’ll say it again, Oh, if I’d only learned this at 21. Or even 31.

There are some great performances here. Jesse Eisenberg (who was in The Squid and the Whale, though I don’t remember him). And Kristen Stewart, as Em, whose performance actually makes me want to see Twilight. Oh, and Martin Starr as Joel, James’s buddy. The coolest nerd you’ll ever encounter.

What’s it all about (Alfie)? I don’t know. I’m not really prepared to say yet. But I’m definitely still savoring its bits….the tube socks, the turquoise jewelry, the way James uses his line about wanting to be a travel writer in the same way that Charles Dickens was several times, knowing that, with the right audience, it makes him sound cool. The scene were Bobby goes after a thug with a baseball bat, and, a second later, goes back to tabulating his accounts.

I could go on.