Summer Romance
by LAUREN BANS
Adventureland
dir. Greg Mottola
107 min
Apparently it was impossible to fall in love in the late ‘80s without a car. Imagine if Lloyd Dobler had never driven Diane Court home after she ignored him all night at the party. They would have never gotten to intimately share their jejune angst with each other, he would have never taught her how to drive stick shift, and they would have never parked by the ocean and stick shifted in the backseat. Essentially the genre of Boring People Have Summer Romance wouldn’t exist without motorized vehicles.
The romance between Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in Adventureland is similar, if less boring. Set in 1987, they fall in love driving to Velvet Underground songs, parking under bridges, and giving each other rides home.
The amusement park helps too. It’s trashy and gross — the butt of some really funny jokes — but the general idiocy of the place also serves to make Em (Stewart), a NYU student on summer break, and James (Eisenberg), a prospective Columbia grad student, stand out to each other.
It’s like going to Forever 21 and getting tricked into loving the least offensive thing in the store mostly because it’s not an elastic tube top with a sequined portrait of Fergie. Oh hello, fellow carnie with a close-to-Ivy-league education! Obviously you’re the one I should date around here.
That’s not to say the main characters aren’t likable. James, a Comp Lit major who takes a job at Adventureland to raise money for grad school in the fall, has a sweetness to him that usually doesn’t exist in males with such nicely contoured cheekbones who major in the literary arts.
He gets away with saying things like “I read poetry for fun” and “I want to be a travel writer, but not like the Dickens kind” because he’s soft-spoken and still a virgin. He also has a huge Adam’s Apple that just kind of hangs heavy on screen at all times and reminded me of a testicle. But that’s neither here nor there.
Em, his coworker, is cooler. We know this mostly because she’s had sex, lots of it, and because she wears oversized Husker Du t-shirts, likes drugs, and goes to NYU. She works at Adventureland not out of financial necessity like James and everyone else there, but to escape being home. Her Mom died two years ago, and her Dad has remarried a woman who seems pretty inoffensive considering the amount of vitriol and wrath she inspires in Stewart.
At points it seems like Stewart’s family distress is only there to give her otherwise subdued character some depth and personality. Oh, and also so she can participate in an affair with the married maintenance guy, because, you know, women with Daddy issues do stuff like that.
It felt like the film tried to, but ultimately didn’t know how to care about her character, except as the object of puppy dog luv. The camera is perfect for this—it mimics James’s eyes searching her face during car rides in a way that almost made me understand what having an emopenis is like. But by way of dialogue, Em never says much beyond how she’s “going through a lot of shit right now” and James doesn’t even ask her what her college major/life goals are in return, which was annoying.
To be fair, Em is supposed to be one of those reticent low key girls — but when James messes up and his friend scolds him for taking Em for granted, there’s not much evidence to support his claim that she’s “the coolest”, except that she has really good taste in music and she’s Jewish. It’s a given that Jewish girls are the best.
Then again, there’s not much to James either, it’s only that he gets home team advantage by being the subject of the bildungsroman story arc. Adventureland is funny thanks to Kristen Wiig and Martin Starr, and Stewart and Eisenberg make the romance satisfyingly sweet, but you have to wonder: what are these kids actually going to talk about once this Cure montage is over?
Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She blogs here, and tumbls here.
"Close to Me (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)
"A Man Inside My Mouth (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)
"Stop Dead (demo)" — The Cure (mp3)
