Greg Mottola’s Adventureland ought to be taken together
with I Love You, Man, reviewed
in this space a few weeks ago. Both are guy movies about what it
means to grow up and be a man, but they come to opposite
conclusions. I Love You, Man subscribes to the common
pop cultural view that ideas of manhood as something to be
aspired to by adolescents who have already been admitted to all
the ordinary amusements of adulthood are quaint survivals at best
and evidence of some kind of psychopathology at worst. Its hero
had nothing to learn but that, with enough circumspection, a guy
can have it all, including even marriage, without ever attaining
an appreciable amount of maturity more than he possessed at 17.
Adventureland, by contrast, at least takes seriously —
though with a certain ambiguity — the old-fashioned view that
there is or ought to be a crossing of the bar from childish
things to responsible adulthood, and that this crossing it is at
least desirable and perhaps necessary for a man to make, if he is
to be a man and not an overgrown teenager.
This grownupness, you may be thinking, was not exactly promised
by Mr. Mottola’s previous film, Superbad,
which lived almost entirely in that adolescent world whose
inability to look beyond itself and its desires, except in terms
of fantasy, is a species of narcissism. Yet there were also
moments of detachment and satire in Superbad which to
some extent redeemed the film. They could be taken, at any rate,
as earnest of better things to come — things like the
thoughtfulness and understated comedy of his first film, The
Daytrippers of a dozen years ago which, like
Adventureland, he wrote as well as directed. The new
film’s setting — Pittsburgh, 1987 — and the relatively advanced
age of his virginal hero, who is a recent college graduate, not a
high school student, also might have suggested a new seriousness
of purpose.
If so, he has left us a reminder of the Superbad — or
I Love You, Man — species of arrested development in
the character of Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush), a high school friend of
his boy-man hero, Jim Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg). Tommy’s
development appears to have been arrested not at 17 but somewhere
nearer 12, and his customary greeting to Jim on meeting is a
punch in the gonads. He’s the movie’s memento mori,
always present before the eyes of our hero to remind him of the
fate lying in store for those who say to adolescence, “Stay, thou
art so fair.” Somehow, it’s not surprising to me to find on the
IMDB message boards for this movie one devoted to the Frigo fan
base. “He was the only GOOD thing about this movie, I think!”
wrote one of the Frigoites. There speaks the voice of the popular
culture Mr. Mottola is, at least to some extent, reacting
against.
It’s also remarkable that the principal way in which Jim has
learned to stand out against the merely hedonistic values of that
culture is an instinctive sense of gallantry towards women. So
far as we can see, he has not been “raised that way,” since his
father (Jack Gilpin) is an alcoholic and his mother (Wendie
Malick) has shrewish tendencies and neither is obviously a
stickler for manners or traditional ideas of sex roles. Perhaps
he has got his notion of proper behavior out of the old books he
has been reading as a literature major at Oberlin, unlikely as
that seems, even in 1987. Now, he is on his way to journalism
school at Columbia by way of a summer spent in Europe when
suddenly he learns that, owing to business reverses probably
connected with his drinking problem, dad can no longer pay,
either for the vacation or for grad school. Jim has to give up
the one and get a summer job at a down-market amusement park near
his home in Pittsburgh to make enough money for the other.
There is a certain amount of Superbad-style comedy, only
not so uproarious, in the grotesques that run or hang out at the
seedy amusement park, though Jim makes one good friend in Joel
(Martin Starr), a would-be intellectual like himself who affects
a tobacco pipe — and who admits that it is an affectation — and
he soon finds himself falling in love with Emily (Kristen
Stewart). Warned against telling any girl he likes that he is
still a virgin, Jim can’t resist telling her of his college
relationship with a girl named Betsy, with whom he broke up after
reading Shakespeare’s sonnet number 57 (“Being your slave, what
should I do but tend/Upon the hours and times of your desire?”)
and realizing that he didn’t want to be her slave or tend upon
the hours and times of her desire.
That’s quite a sophisticated joke in itself, and it’s compounded
by his noticing the irony of the fact that the hour and time of
her desire finally came round to him just as he realized this.
“And you didn’t just f*** her anyway?” asks Emily, incredulously.
She herself has a tangled sexual history which accounts for most
of the film’s narrative momentum, such as it is, and which
contributes to the irony of her remark. We are made to see at
once in this forlorn survival of a scrap of gentlemanliness in a
world otherwise without standards except, sometimes, those of
personal loyalty a form of youthful naiveté — but one rather to
be grown into rather than out of. I also like the idea, hinted at
rather than insisted upon, that growing out of J-school may also
be a mark of maturity and manhood. But these two promising
sprouts, like the hairs upon his chin, are not by themselves
quite enough to make a man of Jim, and Mr. Mottola is mostly
content to honor him for being gentle rather than being a
gentleman. It’s a start, I guess.
