Adventureland

Adventureland is a sensitive dramedy, more drama than comedy, that details the summer in college where you worked a crappy minimum wage job and had your first taste of a real adult relationship. The tone might waver from time to time, the scenes with Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig are humorous but almost too goofy, but the great performances by Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart make the movie enjoyable.

Eisenberg, attractive in a real-world alterna-boy way, plays James, a recent graduate whose parents were supposed to help pay for a European trip but life happens. His father loses his job, they can’t afford the European trip and he has to work a crappy job all summer long in order to afford Columbia. At Adventureland, a shoddy amusement park in Pittsburgh, James meets Em, played to neurotic and sensitive perfection by Kristen Stewart. She saves him from getting knifed, and so begins their romantic dance.

Whenever we get to watch scenes featuring just the two of them awkwardly fumbling through flirtations and makeouts the movie is at its most honest and endearing. Other scenes involving the group of friends and co-workers can charm and humor us with their truth and honesty. Who hasn’t had to deal with a co-worker coming in to work high? (For the record, it’s annoying.) There is much to like, even if every adult we encounter in the movie seems to be some villainous confection beamed in from a John Hughes movie.

Superbad this is not. In fact, I preferred Adventureland to the previous films overindulgence in penis jokes and blandly written female characters. Em and the ditzy bombshell Lisa P. feel like real people. They’re insecure, prone to conflicting emotions and flawed. How rare is that in a movie aimed squarely at a certain age group which advertisers pay through the nose to target. It’s the stillness and quiet moments that make Adventureland so pleasurable. That, and whoever put together the soundtrack must love to pay Lou Reed royalties.