I may never have worked as a carny in a rundown amusement park, but I did spend my late high school/early college years working in family fun centres similar to Chuck E. Cheese's. So I could relate to the feeling of working a shitty, go nowhere job for little money, serving terrible people and their terrible kids. It definitely sucked; but oddly, it was still pretty great. Not because there was a lot of fun to be had with the actual job, but rather because places like that require large staffs of people willing to work for minimum wage. No, I don't mean illegal immigrants — I mean young people. Thus, when not dealing with the shit that the job throws at you, you're basically getting paid to hang out with friends, feel superior to your customers, and hook up with co-workers. Which probably explains why I spent so much time at those jobs, even when I wasn't on the clock.
It also partially explains why I loved Adventureland so much, but I think you'll enjoy it even if it didn't mirror some of your life experiences as much as it mirrored my own, as it taps into something elemental about that time of your life. It's infused with a deep sense of melancholy throughout, with enough warmth that it doesn't devolve into an intolerable exercise in vanity or navel-gazing. It can be a tough balancing act when dramatizing your own memories and experiences on screen, and Mottola wisely gives enough of his film over to the supporting cast and setting, rather than making Eisenberg the hero he never got to be in real life. It's been pointed out elsewhere, but it's worth mentioning that this is the second time Eisenberg has been cast as the younger self of the director/writer of the movie he's in (previously playing a semi-fictional version of a young Noah Baumbach in The Squid and the Whale). I enjoyed him a lot more this time out, and not just because his character is less of an intolerable prick.
He and Stewart exhibit enough chemistry to invest in their budding relationship, although the film could've used more on her character. Martin Starr was a highlight as Eisenberg's work buddy Joel, another bookish, harmlessly pretentious character along the lines of his work in Freaks and Geeks and Party Down. Hader and Wiig play characters similar to their work in various films and Saturday Night Live, only with zaniness turned way down. I love them both, but both have the tendency to go too far with the idiosyncrasies of their characters (a danger of live sketch comedy I imagine), but not here. By playing down the craziness in their characters, they achieve the best laugh of the film when finally getting a chance to go off.
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