Carnie & Friends

[April 1st, 2009]

Greg Mottola is 46 years old. This is, I think, the most important fact about the director who made a small splash in 1996 with The Daytrippers, manufactured much larger waves two summers ago with Superbad, and now has released Adventureland, a comedy based on his own experiences as a midway-manning stiff in 1987. Mottola is in the enviable position where he can tell any story he cares to, and at the age where this is the story he cares about telling. Yet I can’t help suspecting that if he were a little younger or a little older, Adventureland would be a better movie—or at least a tougher one.

Indulge me in a personal digression. Adventureland was filmed at Kennywood, a quaint and often slightly tumbledown amusement park outside Pittsburgh, Pa. When I was 5 years old, I followed the lead of an older cousin—he was 6, and thus knew what he was doing—and got increasingly lost for the better part of an hour in Kennywood, while our parents conducted a panicked search. This is one of my earliest memories, and many of the others were also formed inside the gates of second-rate fun parks. During high school, for example, my best friend worked the children’s rides at Florida’s Cypress Gardens, until a regrettable incident involving unauthorized use of the parachute drop forced his reassignment to the circus tent. On summer afternoons, before meeting him to loiter in the mall, I would wait in the grandstands, watching haggard Russian gymnasts twirl hula hoops. Those were the days, I suppose.

Are you still reading? Have you somehow managed to not get annoyed? Then you are the ideal audience for Adventureland, an episodic reminiscence of Greg Mottola’s wonder years next to the Tilt-a-Whirl. His alter ego—his nom de flume—is James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), a college graduate whose liberal-arts degree has qualified him for many jobs that do not provide actual paychecks, and one that does: a carnie gig at the local fun park, Adventureland. The movie is very effective at conveying the shabby self-disgust James and his fellow employees feel toward their posts, which mostly involve ensuring no guest actually wins one of the giant stuffed pandas. “We are doing the work of lazy morons,” notes Joel (Martin Starr), who smokes a pipe, so he should know.

The unchallenging work gives James plenty of time to concentrate on his chief preoccupation, losing his virginity—a task that would be much easier if he would stop talking about it. (“Do you mean intercourse, specifically?” asks Eisenberg, who is still mining the clueless pedantry he learned from The Squid and the Whale.) James’ saving social grace is a big bag of weed, which is how he is introduced to Em (Kristen Stewart), who anybody with half a brain can see is the most interesting person in Adventureland. (James has half a brain.) Stewart has specialized in playing sexually forward teenage girls—most famously in Twilight, where her sensuality tormented her abstemious, undead boyfriend—and this role isn’t a departure. But it’s her most layered work yet, and especially notable because it makes the movie the first Judd Apatow-produced project to allow itself a female lead with wit and awareness to outpace the boys.

When it’s not sidetracked by clowning (SNL staples Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, as the park’s managers, are working in a different movie, which revolves closely around the proper refrigeration of corn dogs), Adventureland is finely observed, from the Falco hit “Rock Me Amadeus” torturing the employees on PA loop to the Catholic anti-Semitism that thwarts a potential romance. (“The Jews have been through worse,” says a resigned Joel.) Its tranquil, forgiving vibe exactly captures how someone who came of age in 1987 Pittsburgh would prefer to remember it. Which is also the movie’s problem. It sets up encounters freighted with real misunderstanding and pain, then glosses them with a rosy varnish of nostalgia. I can believe that these things happened, more or less, to Greg Mottola—but I don’t buy that he felt this good about them. A filmmaker closer to the events, or further away, would be more willing to confront them. Mottola sees them the way he cares to: Those were the days. I suppose.