DIRECTOR Greg Mottola's new film Adventureland, (****) which gets its second screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival tomorrow, is one of those American rites-of-passage movies that so effortlessly nails what it's like to be young that watching it is liable to induce sensory flashbacks.
The period details, the situations and the people may differ, but the intense feelings and emotions you experience when you're on the brink of trying to figure out what to do with your life and wondering when, exactly, that life is going to start properly, are fairly universal and Adventureland taps into them in a way that no other American film has done since Richard Linklater's double whammy of Dazed & Confused and Before Sunrise in the early 1990s.
Based on Mottola's own experiences, the film takes place in Pittsburgh in 1987 and revolves around recent college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg), an aspiring travel essayist whose idyllic plans (a trip to Europe and then grad school) are suddenly put on hold by an economic downturn that has resulted in his dad being demoted.
Forced to get a job but qualified for nothing (not even manual labour), he finds himself working at the titular rundown rickety funfair, which turns out to be a haven for fellow slackers, introverts and bedroom intellectuals, as well as going-nowhere jocks, cheerleaders and ageing lotharios (these two social groups are amusingly divided by the types of jobs they get at the park, with the former overwhelmingly assigned to "Games" and the latter "Rides"). It's here he meets Em (Kristen Stewart), a music-loving New York University student working at the park for the summer to annoy her socially climbing new stepmother. Falling in love with her almost instantly, James has an instant connection with Em and you can tell she kind of feels it too.
Against her better judgment, though, she's already involved with Adventureland's married maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds), whose claim that he once jammed with Lou Reed has given him an almost mythological status among his younger colleagues. It's a modest, unshowy role for Reynolds, and, after being the best thing in a series of dreadful movies, seeing him in something worthy of his talents is one of Adventureland's many pleasures, particularly because he succeeds in making Connell a much more tragic figure than he first appears. Mining deeper layers of melancholy, he gives us a sense of a guy who, despite his bravado and surface cool, has come to understand his place in the world and is quietly sad about where he's ended up.
Eisenberg and Stewart make their characters similarly rounded, with the former subverting the nerdy clichés, playing James as someone with a degree of confidence in certain aspects of his life if not in others, while Stewart presents Em as a girl who has had plenty of heartache and disappointment in her life but doesn't beg us to love her.
Mottola also smartly refuses to make his protagonists cooler-than-thou. Working more in the vein of his debut indie hit The Daytrippers than his Judd Apatow behemoth Superbad, he takes a democratic approach to the characters, refusing to condescend towards any of them, even the more broadly conceived supporting players that are there mainly to ratchet up the comedy. This, together with the meticulous (but never intrusive) period detail and impeccable soundtrack choices (which range from Husker Du to Falco) helps give Adventureland a wondrous sense of authenticity and truthfulness that burrows beneath the clichés of the genre.
It's too bad the same can't be said for
Boogie Woogie (**), a shrill satire on the London art scene, which, despite listing Damien Hirst as a consultant in the credits, never feels particularly credible as an insider's view of this world. An ongoing autobiographical video installation by an up-and-coming artist and the relentless efforts of a dealer to acquire the Mondrian painting that supplies the film with its title are the narrative through-lines around which myriad characters congregate.
What should be an Altman-esque immersion into this scene is marred by one-note characterisation, unconvincing performances from its scene-chewing name cast (Danny Huston, Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard are particularly bad) and some fairly listless direction, all of which makes its token effort to examine the way art has become an investment rather than something to be cherished over the years seem even shallower.
Still, it's not as bad as
Romeo and Juliet vs the Living Dead (*), a film that should probably have remained a drunken pub conversation, or, at most, have been turned into a YouTube-posted short. A slapstick attempt to rework the Bard's tragic romance for a world in which a tentative truce exists between the living and the living dead, Ryan Denmark's zombie flick isn't clever enough or funny enough to make its high concept fly. To be fair, the final chainsaw-heavy twist on the story's tragic ending is quite funny, but not funny enough to justify sitting through the previous 80 minutes.
• For all of Alistair Harkness's Edinburgh International Film Festival reviews, visit
www.scotsman.com/artsblog. You can read his final festival round-up in tomorrow's newspaper.
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