Take Your Baby To The Carnival On A Saturday Night-Adventureland (2009)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Adventureland, starring Kristie Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, 2009

Not every film by this reviewer has to have a serious social message (although it helps) or be so gripping that he had to see the thing over and over again as it becomes one of filmdom’s classic pieces like Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes, and the film under review Adventureland exactly fits this category, he just needs film to ward of the willies. Usually a comedy of some sort will fill the bill and in this case it is a romantic comedy that has calmed his nerves.     

No question it never hurts that the locale of this comedy was located in Adventureland, in an amusement park, run down though it might be, since he has been enthralled by the “magic” of the neon lights and its swarm of grifters, drifters, goofs and midnight sifters at amusement parks and carnivals since early childhood. Still does consider himself an above average hand at Skee and its coupon-laden kewpie doll prizes. Actually, and he has written about the fact elsewhere, had run away with the carnival for a couple of days in his youth before being reined in by fearful and angry parents. So he has a pedigree of sorts in what the lure of the bright lights, tumultuous array of sounds, and smells from hot dogs to cotton candy brings to the even the normally sedate.   

Of course the amusement park motif is just so much backdrop for the real boy-meets-girl angle behind this and more than half the films ever created. Here’s the play. James, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is an aspiring graduate student, Columbia School of Journalism no less, with downwardly mobile parents who cannot afford to spring for a promised  grand tour of Europe and hence the summer job at Adventureland, the fate of many liberal arts graduates of late. As he gets the hang of the job after about two minutes, basically as long as it takes a co-worker to fill him of the grift, the scams that make the suckers pay for cheapjack stuff and like it, he becomes friendly with plenty of the co-workers. The usual cross-section of guys and gals who work the carny/theme park scene down at the edges of society.       

One of those co-workers, Emily, played by fetching Kristie Stewart last seen in this space working her magic on the guys who played Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac in the film adaptation of the latter’s On The Road, catches his eye and we are off to the races. Naturally it would be a very short film if the obvious attraction they had for each other had them immediately go off into the blissful sunset. Problem number one was that James was by choice, by discriminating choice, if you can believe this in this day in age, a virgin and was not sure whether he wanted to commit to Emily and wind up “doing the do” with her, a sexually experienced woman. Problem number two alienated from her parents Emily was in a hush-hush sexual relationship with the park’s married handyman. Don’t worry because in the end after some serious talking and smoking some serious weed they do wind up going hand and hand into the sunset, wind up “doing the do.”         

By the way it never hurts either in a film on youthful confusion about life to have a soundtrack that features the late Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes and other songs done with the Velvet Underground.