Adventureland
Written and directed by Greg Mottola. With Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, and Wendie Malick. (R)
Sometimes a film so expertly captures a time that watching it becomes almost literally a transporting experience. Viewing films that manage that trick can reorder our own memories, so that the Vietnam era of The Deer Hunter, for instance, becomes the Vietnam era we come to remember. See also the mall culture of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the high school dramatics of John Hughes' iconic The Breakfast Club, or the '50s of James Dean. Now add to that list Adventureland, a warm-hearted new comedy from the director of Superbad.
Set in 1987, the film locks in the feel of the time principally through its use of music. The amusement park where under-employed college grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is working for the summer blasts a steady rotation of hard rock hair bands, the type whose videos (MTV was launched that same decade) would most likely feature women, cars and an exotic animal. Once the rides are shut down for the night, Brennan and his newfound friends—outcasts all—spend a lot of time driving around Pittsburgh, getting high and listening to their own, moodier, music.
This is a sensitive, bookish crew—in the film's saddest scene, one tries to use a Gogol paperback as others might use flowers—and Brennan quickly finds himself falling for its ringleader, the plainspoken Em (Kristen Stewart), a young woman whose self-assured exterior belies a hollow family life and an unfulfilling affair with the park's married maintenance man. In a pitch-perfect turn, Brennan's tentative romantic overture comes in the form of a mix tape made up of his favorite "Bummer Songs."
It's that acknowledgement of music's importance—not just to the soundtrack, but to the film's characters and, by extension, to us—that makes Adventureland stand out. (It may also bear mentioning that I entered high school in the year in which the film is set; markedly older or younger viewers might not share my sense of nostalgia.) But music can only take a film so far; without a smart script and Eisenberg and Stewart—particularly Stewart, who shifts subtly between confident and insecure, nondescript and luminous—it would likely be just another throwaway romance (see the similar but disappointing Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist). With them, it approaches a love story, one whose aim is true.
*
Also this week: The old adage that truth is stranger than fiction manifests itself in five films—three documentaries and a brace of "based on true events" features—coming to the area this week. First up is King Corn, screening at 7 p.m. on Thursday at Greenfield's Traprock Center for Peace and Justice. This gently chiding documentary follows college buddies and science nerds Ian and Curt on their quest to uncover the reasons behind our country's mind-boggling attachment to cheap corn.
To understand how corn ends up in nearly everything Americans eat—in addition to the ubiquity of high fructose corn syrup, our meat is corn-fed, and corn-based processed foods have taken center stage in our national diet—the pair return to the rural Iowa county where their great-grandfathers lived. There, they plant an acre of corn, with a plan to follow their harvest as it makes its way into the national food supply. Along the way, they make some unpleasant discoveries about the darker side of cheap abundance: the massive feed lots where thousands of cows are fattened on corn, and neighborhoods devastated by diabetes brought on by a diet built on corn syrup. Director Aaron Woolf, in explaining that the government began to subsidize corn farming as a way to combat widespread hunger, notes that "bad outcomes can come from well-intentioned actions…yes, food is cheaper now, but we are only beginning to understand the full cost that cheapness demands from our environment, our health and our social fabric."
Gini Reticker's documentary Pray The Devil Back To Hell, which opens this week at Amherst Cinema, is a decidedly darker film, one that looks back at the recent conflicts in Liberia. At a time when then-President Charles Taylor turned drug-fueled children into his own terrorizing army, a coalition of women reached across religious lines to find a way to turn the tide of violence. Their methods are sometimes familiar (demonstrating in local marketplaces) and sometimes novel (refusing to have sex with their husbands; threatening their sons with traditional curses) but always pursued with passion. Largely due to their actions and dedication, Taylor was forced out of office in 2003. Two years later, Liberian voters made reformer Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Africa's first elected female head of state.
Also at Amherst this weekend is Once in Afghanistan: A Benefit for Projects to Rebuild Afghanistan, which screens Saturday morning. Filmmaker Jill Vickers, who will be present at the screening, made the film as a "message of understanding" in a time when the Afghans once again find themselves at a crossroads with the West. The film recalls the experiences of female Peace Corps volunteers who, in the 1960s, teamed up with Afghan "vaccinator teams" in an effort to eradicate smallpox and improve the health of the country's women and children. Overcoming both disease and cultural taboos, the vaccinators came to feel a lasting bond with a culture that once more has come under fire.
Finally, two films inspired by extraordinary biographies appear this week. The Counterfeiters is the Academy Award winning tale of Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch, a man known as the "king of the counterfeiters" in 1930s Berlin. Based on the wartime years of real-life counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff, the film relates his early rise to criminal prosperity and his downfall at the hands of the Nazis. Sent to a concentration camp, his uncommon talents provide him with the possibility of survival when the Germans decide on a daring plan to destabilize foreign economies. Tasked with aiding the Nazi war machine, Sorowitsch must decide if saving himself is worth dooming others. A film that asks some hard moral questions without ever giving easy answers, The Counterfeiters screens on Thursday, April 23 at 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at Stirn Auditorium on the Amherst College campus.
Max Oph?ls' 1955 film Lola Montes is based on the incredible life story of Eliza Gilbert, an Irish-born dancer who reinvented herself as Lola Montes, a "Spanish dancer" whose scandalous offstage life brought at least as much notoriety as her infamous Spider Dance. Romantically linked to men from Franz Liszt to Alexandre Dumas, in the 1840s she became mistress to Ludwig I of Bavaria until public outrage over her manipulations at court helped lead to his downfall. Dead of pneumonia by her early 40s, Montes left behind a life Dumas himself might have written.
Yet the film version of that story was a colossal flop when it first opened, mostly due to a critical backlash against its heavy use of flashbacks as a storytelling device. Making matters worse, its producers tried to save their investment by recutting the film—the term most often employed by modern critics is "butchered"—to unreel in a more audience-friendly chronology. The state-of-the-art restoration screening at Amherst Cinema has finally returned the film to Oph?ls' forward-thinking vision; the result is the capstone to his career.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
