The Screengrab : the squid and the whale

Screengrab Review: “Adventureland”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

It’s the summer of 1987, which means I’m cleaning rooms at a motel in Ellsworth, Maine between my sophomore and junior years of college. It’s not my dream summer job by any means; I’d much rather be manning the midway at the Blue Hill Fair, urging passersby to shoot squirtguns at the clown’s nose for the chance to win themselves a decorative and functional Def Leppard mirror. The screams from the Zipper ride, the smell of fried dough in the air, the sounds of AC/DC wafting from the Tilt-a-Whirl, the camaraderie of the carnies…what could be better?

The summer that could have been comes to life in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland, although not quite as vividly as I’d hoped. Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) stars as recent college grad James Brennan, a soft-spoken, sensitive virgin whose plans of spending the summer in Europe are derailed when his father is demoted. Still hoping to attend graduate school at Columbia in the fall, James is forced to take a summer job at the local amusement park, where he meets cute-but-brooding Em (Twilight's Kristen Stewart). They bond over weed and a love of alternative rock, but little does James know Em is sleeping with married maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds).

Mottola the screenwriter undermines Mottola the director as the relationship issues between James and Em are put through some very familiar paces, particular once James, unsure whether he and Em are an exclusive item, goes on a date with the hottie of the park, Lisa P (Margarita Levieva). The plot mechanics are a drag because Adventureland is at its best when it’s in laid-back, hanging out mode. The park is populated by an appealing cast, including former Freaks and Geeks-er Martin Starr as intellectual Joel and the underused Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as managers Rich and Paulette. Mottola nails the seedy attraction of the park and its surroundings (including a dead-on townie bar featuring the obligatory dreadful cover band), but much of the comedic potential of Adventureland itself remains untapped. There’s a little too much puking for comic effect, although Superbad fans should be warned that gross bodily function humor isn’t a priority here.

It’s not really fair to review the movie I wanted to see rather than the one Mottola made, but I would have preferred a more freewheeling, ensemble-friendly approach – a 1987 Dazed and Confused set in an amusement park rather than the creaky rom-com that emerges. The overreliance on Eisenberg and Stewart to carry the film is misguided because their personalities aren’t up to the task; Eisenberg is fine but we already have a Michael Cera, and Stewart is a bit out of her depth in Em’s darker moments. Their ride is too familiar, and I really wanted to hear those screams from the Zipper.

Forgotten Films: Mr. Jealousy (1997)

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.

The movie stars '90s indie stalwart Eric Stoltz as Lester Grimm, who's locked in a pattern of gumming up his love life with displays of obsessive jealousy. Stoltz thinks that his current girlfriend, Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), might be the one, which makes it all the more intolerable when he lays eyes on her ex, a cool-stepping novelist named Dashiell (Chris Eigeman), and can't stop wondering about Ramona's past. Lester ends up joining Dash's encounter therapy group, the better to find out whether the guy is obsessing over Ramona and to learn choice details about their past together. Of course, in order to disguise his identity, he has to refrain from talking about his own problems in therapy, so he borrows the problems of his best friend, played by Carlos Jacott. Then, when the process inevitably leaves him feeling more confused than ever, he winds up getting Jacott to join the group so that Jacott can pretend to have Stoltz's problems. Jacott just about steals the movie, especially when, taking on the assignment of pretending to be someone else with the deranged commitment of an idealistic Method actor, he turns up in the group earnestly discussing Stoltz's self-perpetuating neuroses in an outrageously bogus British accent. Mr. Jealousy is much lighter than Bamubach's more recent film, but it could be his funniest work. — Phil Nugent

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent