While casting his knockout quasi-biopic The Social Network, film-maker David Fincher must’ve really dug how eventual Mark Zuckerberg portrayer Jesse Eisenberg handled being dumped on screen. A year before the award-lassoing Facebook drama, which led to an Oscar nomination for Eisenberg, the actor agonised through the dreamy foreground of Adventureland as reluctant carny James Brennan.
The parallels between Fincher’s and Greg Mottola’s movies begin and end with their opening unceremonious separations, yet an admittedly romantic logic does allow me to soak in the notion that the great directorial mind behind such zingers as Zodiac and Gone Girl also found solace in this cinematic time machine.
Bouncing through the year 1987 under a cloud of weed and Lou Reed, wannabe “travel essayist” James suffers a reality check when his dad’s demotion means that the family can no longer fund a planned European jolly with his best mate, Eric.
Faced with an empty summer before studying at Columbia University, the Charles Darwin acolyte manages to bag himself a job at the titular theme park, where amusement stations are inexplicably slapped with names like the Flighing Dutchman. “You got a concussion on the teacup ride there when you were six,” is his mum’s scepticism that doubles down on our protagonist’s unsuitability for Adventureland. The delicious thing about this retro limbo realm of yawning-clown bins, unashamedly rigged games and Tilt-A-Whirls is the fact that almost none of its poorly paid denizens belong there.
Take maintenance guy Connell for instance, played by Ryan Reynolds. He’s coolly tricked everyone into believing that he once jammed with the aforementioned Velvet Underground legend; swaggering through the ice-cream and candy floss chaos like some sort of god while his admiring co-workers wave from their various vomit-stained habitats.
Adventureland’s evergreen feelgood factor is partly associated with the pre-Deadpool era, where future world-beater Reynolds wasn’t indulged by major Hollywood studios to essentially play a carbon copy of himself in a superhero gimp suit, or to front sappy football documentaries with that trademark toilet wit. Here, he’s tethered to a specific lovelorn reality where nobody can go home with a plush “giant ass panda”. That’s a warning delivered early doors by Bill Hader’s unhinged park co-runner Bobby – “Just gimme a fucking reason, you don’t know what I’m capable of!” he seethes at a jock wanting to knock seven shades out of James – the star reteaming with Superbad director Mottola for a much richer and sophisticated portrait of YA yearning.
Just like that movie’s Seth, Evan and McLovin, James spends the duration negotiating the awkwardness of the “Scarlet V”, while his hyaena-like torturer Frigo pummels him with bollock-busting jabs in front of the very girls he hopes to slide into bed with. The big difference between Adventureland and every other coming-of-age comedy of my lifetime, though, is its soul-lifting nostalgia neatly embodied by the now-fossilising funfair. I’m so taken by this iconography of yesteryear that I even bought the same blue T-shirt that James wears for his uniform (it’s been reduced to a fence-painting scruff over the years). Ironically, you’ll never catch me on a rollercoaster. Riddle me that one?
Mottola’s 2009 movie continues to reel me back in as a memory portal to my first-ever job too. Making friends at a local clothing shop located next-door to my favourite haunt: the cinema; the pranks we’d often pull on each other to get through the days; the nights out together; surprise hook-ups; that blissful sense of freedom before life got real, and the silly energy of a busy seasonal period. It was all about the people on shift with you and Adventureland is an echo of those times, encased in celluloid. “I’m amazed at how tiny my paycheck is, I’ve been working doubles …” James complains to Joel (Martin Starr), which is sardonically met with: “Well, we are doing the work of lazy, pathetic morons.” Fair play to all of the retail staff out there, especially over Christmas, but these quotes really did ring true for me way back when.
Then there’s a soundtrack beamed in from the 80s, painting sequences (including a stoned session on the dodgems) with the colours of David Bowie, the Replacements, INXS, Crowded House and the Cure. Bastards of the Young blasting over the animated Miramax banner? This is both pure euphoric escapism and a cutting reminder that teen comedies peaked a long time ago.
