Adventureland has many quiet virtues

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      Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart. Rated 14A.

      Although its ambitions are slight, Adventureland has a lot going on beneath the surface. About a dozen years ago, its writer-director, Greg Mottola, crafted a canny indie flick called The Daytrippers. In 2007, he directed (but didn’t write) the megahit Superbad. Here, the sensibilities fall somewhere between those clever efforts, with Mottola’s own Duran Duran–era adolescence (in which he worked at a Long Island amusement park) woven into a slightly more commercial framework. In other words, youngsters looking for gross-out jokes and giant belly laughs are advised to take a different ride. On the other hand, fans of The Squid and the Whale will be happily surprised.


      Watch the trailer for Adventureland.

      Among the new film’s many quiet virtues, the chief is that Squid kid Jesse Eisenberg winningly plays James Brennan, a romantically reserved Pittsburgh native whose plans for grad school in New York City are knocked askew by his parents’ fall from financial grace. Hence the crappy summer job at Adventureland—a theme park so lame it takes Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, as a passively bickering couple, to (barely) hold it together.

      The most conventional aspect of the ambling tale is James’s tentative relationship with a damaged rich girl (Twilight’s effective Kristen Stewart) who is secretly dating the park’s married handyman (Ryan Reynolds). More memorable, somehow, is Adventureland’s collection of losers and oddballs, especially a self-loathing intellectual played by Superbad’s Martin Starr.

      Best of all are the script’s many throwaway lines. When James explains that he caught his mother snooping in his journal, “So I switched to writing in Italian,” he says it like any old dude would understand.

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