Adventureland

I will never be your stepping stone...

If I know the names of this year's Grammy nominees, it is surely because of the time I have spent listening the pre-trailer material in movie theaters this spring. I've become a Duffy fan just while waiting for movies to start over the last couple months.

My faith in movies having been re-ignited by Miley Cyrus, I was back in full enjoyment mode when I took a seat in a nearly empty and tiny auditorium in Leominster on Monday evening to see Adventureland. It was a rare non-matinee visit for me, since I'm such a cheapskate when it comes to my movie habits. When you see as many as I do, it really adds up. But in Leominster, it's only 8.50 for the evening shows. Who can complain really?

There was something about listening to Duffy that evening that made me close my eyes and let the music sink in. For that moment, I felt like it was 1975 again and I was at the Mall Theaters in Ames, Iowa waiting for a movie to start, with that primeval anticipation of the cinematic experience that awaited me, that Kirchnerian magic lantern experience that promises to transform your soul.

The movie itself furthered my journey into the past. It is a period piece, from the summer of 1987, about a young man just graduated from college. Well, hell, that's the summer I was originally supposed to graduate from college too. Like him, I was stymied for a job. I wound up in Alaska measuring aerosol particles. The protagonist of the movie, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) winds up at an amusement park in his hometown of Pittsburgh, consigned to handing out stuffed animals at the ring toss game. Like him, that summer I found myself in the unlikely possession of a quantity of weed.

There was something about Adventureland that felt a little anachronistic to me, however. Most of the movie felt more like the late 1970s than the High 80's that I remembered. The cognitive dissonance really hit me when the soundtrack featured songs like "Don't Dream It's Over", which had burned into my spirit from that time. Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup.

To me, the visual astethic had the more feeling of, say, Linklater's Dazed and Confused. But maybe my 1987 experience was just different from the writer/director, Greg Mottola, who was born the same year as I was. So this really isn't a criticism, just an observation.

Criticizing this movie is the last thing I'd want to do, because for an hour and half, I was able to let down my guard completely and almost capture that magic lantern feeling that I had glimpsed before the movie. It's rare when a movie can really disarm me like that, when I care about the characters and stop caring what the story will do, worrying that it's going to lead me down the path of well-worn cliches.

No, I didn't care about those kinds of quibbling. I just relaxed and went with the flow. It felt good.

I knew I was going to like this movie about fifteen minutes in. During the set-up, Brennan (the protagonist) is told by his boss that under no circumstances is he to let anyone ever win a "giant ass panda" from the concessions. Immediately my narrative radar tells me that this will be a central tension of the movie---trying to keep customers from winning a giant panda, and that eventually he is going to fail at this, probably in Act Three.

But I was wrong. Five minutes later, a customer walks off with a giant panda. The foreshadowed tension is resolved as quickly as it was set-up, leaving me in unknown territory. Suddenly I no longer know what the essential tension of the story is going to be about. I absolutely love it when a movie does this, when the story accelerates the trajectory of the narrative to thwart our anticipations of where it will go. I've always thought it was one reasons why The Simpsons worked so well on television, that it is always accelerating the narrative, to create fresh new ones.

From that point on, I was just along for the ride. I didn't care what happened in the movie. I wasn't waiting for some inevitable shoe to drop. I was simply curious about the characters, in the same way I was when I was ten years old, and movies were all fresh and new to me.

It's a quiet little film, having debuted in Sundance this year. I could almost see why the theater was nearly deserted after a week of release, and that it was consigned to a small auditorium, sharing space with Race to Witch Mountain. But it's a shame that it was. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year, but it is not a Hollywood movie. The characters and story lines are too nuanced.

The story kept thwarting my other-shoe-drop concerns right up to the end. "Oh, yeah," I tell myself, "this is how the love story is going to resolve, by the cliche act of sabotage that seems to be coming." But the sabotage I expected in the story didn't come. It wasn't going to take that easy out.

Even the conclusion seemed inevitable---it was the one I expected---it nevertheless felt fresh. A love story between two people in their early twenties really shouldn't have a "happily ever after ending," even as a comedy. The characters are too young for that. So how do you end it, without pulling something like The Graduate? It's always a problem for a serious film. But here it was done in the perfect way, that's all I say. Go see it for yourself.

And watch Kristen Stewart in this movie, if you skipped Twilight. She can act. She's just getting started. She's going to be around a long time, and will win an Academy Award in 2022, when she's got a few wrinkles beside her eyes, and her youth is a memory like mine is now.