Don’t Dream It’s Over: An All-American Summer in ‘Adventureland’
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
Growing up, there was nothing quite like the final few days before summer break. School winds down and the promise of freedom beckons, as does the hopeful anticipation of blue skies and glorious sunshine.
But once you reach a certain age, summer comes to represent a kind of purgatorial way station, an all-too-short layover between childhood innocence and adulthood responsibility. And few films better capture this phase of life quite like Greg Mottola's Adventureland.
Coming off 2007’s Superbad, Mottola could have made his next film with the same sex-fuelled teenage humor that made his Jonah Hill and Michael Cera vehicle such a cultural smash hit. Instead, Adventureland takes an understated approach with its characters and the comedy that comes from them, resulting in a movie that’s far more thoughtful. It’s about the complicated condition of summer romance and teenage dreams meeting the end of adolescence, packaged together as a rose-tinted callback to John Hughes-era dramatic comedies.
Carnies and Kitsch
Set in 1987, Adventureland follows James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), a college graduate who plans to spend the summer in Europe before attending grad school at Columbia, only to discover post-graduation that a change to his parents’ working situation means he no longer has the finances to travel. Forced to find work to fund his studies, James’ lack of experience sees him rejected from a series of dead-end jobs, as he describes himself with frustration as being “not even qualified for manual labor.”
With no place left to turn, James takes up a summer-long job at Adventureland, a shoddy local amusement park populated by employees who slump over their booths wishing they were anywhere else. It’s a kitsch setting that evokes 1980s Americana, inspired by Mottola’s own experiences working at a Long Island amusement park of the same name during that decade.
If the essence of Adventureland could be crystallized into a single moment, it would be a seemingly nondescript scene inside the first hour. Carnies James, his love interest Em (Kristen Stewart), and kooky friend Joel (Martin Starr) relax and watch evening fireworks at the titular amusement park, serenaded by the diegetic sounds of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House. James and Em shoot cursory glances at each other, nerves and romantic tension filling the space between them, while Joel looks on with a passive sense of loneliness played out across his face.
Each of the three characters is consciously aware of how uncertain their respective futures are, and yet they desperately attempt to cling to the moment anyway.
A whirlpool of hormones and hope
An air of impermanence hangs over Adventureland, both the movie and the setting, and the characters feel it as much as we do. None of the relationships cultivated by James appears set in stone; neither his budding romance with Em or his new friendships with Joel and enigmatic handyman Connell (Ryan Reynolds). It’s emblematic of how fleeting summertime can be, and how summer romance may burn bright but more often than not can fade to nothing.
Stewart’s casting allows that feeling to further permeate through the screen, as she embodies the prototypical beautiful but mysterious and endearingly aloof girl-next-door type. Em immediately attracts James’ interest, but the tangible chemistry between them seems situational at best. Much of the movie is experienced through James’ viewpoint as he flits from one scenario to the next. Shortly after taking up work at Adventureland he falls for Em, but that doesn’t stop him from taking flirtatious It-girl Lisa P on a date, which happens off the back of Em rebuffing him after being told by Connell, who Em is secretly sleeping with, that James has fallen in love with her.
Adventureland is a whirlpool of hormones, hopefulness, and unrestrained emotions, yet all these things feel insignificant by the film’s end. Adventureland immediately becomes a thing of the past, something that James wants to put behind him. In the moment, his feelings, his love, and his inevitable heartbreak are all he has. But they quickly fade, and that further represents how summer experiences can feel enormously important, but with the gift of hindsight they become far less so.
Mottola bucks convention by bringing James and Em together as the movie closes out, with the former journeying to New York City in a desperate attempt to make amends with the girl he’s spent the entire summer pining after. It’s contradictory to the film’s themes, perhaps representing more of a Cinderella story arc—a wish fulfillment conclusion instead of a more realistic one.
Eisenberg and Stewart share organic chemistry, and they make the ending work; both possess kindred neurotic tendencies that discernibly mesh. And despite James’ negative actions and the teenage boy missteps he makes, I have to admit: I wanted to see them end up together. Summer romances are, after all, not exclusively doomed to fail.
Adventureland, USA
There are a handful of summer locales that will always feel distinctively American to me, thanks in part to their prominence in popular culture.
Summer camps aren’t nearly as notable or widely attended in my native United Kingdom compared to the United States. Drive-in movie theaters were virtually non-existent before the COVID-19 pandemic. And amusement parks, though present throughout the UK, are more often found as small temporary fairgrounds than permanent installations.
“Summer experiences can feel enormously important, but with the gift of hindsight they become far less so.”
Adventureland, at least to an international layman, feels like a staple of Everytown, USA. It’s a baked slice of American culture, served up with a side of warm nostalgia, and it goes down easy. That which makes it feel so distinctly American, though, ultimately serves as little more than set dressing, because the movie resonates far more broadly.
Feeling the post-schooling summer malaise is a universal sensation, but Adventureland reminds us that it isn’t wise to forget all the good when that period of our lives comes to an end. It might be fleeting, and many memories will inevitably fade with time, but memorable summer experiences will always consciously or even subconsciously subsist. James and Em may detest how working at Adventureland made them feel, but that summer job changed who they were, for better or worse.
Now as an adult, summer has come to symbolize little more than a brief weather improvement. Maybe there’ll be football to watch, or perhaps you won’t need an excuse to enjoy a drink in the sunshine. But movies like Adventureland remind me of what it was like to be younger and to meet that final transitional stage of youth, full of excitement and apprehension in equal measure. It’s a coming-of-age masterwork from Mottola that’s drawn with sincerity and emotional precision, drowned in the kind of post-summer haze that'll make you fondly reminisce.
Elliott Cuff is a writer, journalist, and film enthusiast. Follow him on Instagram @elliottlovesmovies.