Make a Narrative About Falling in Love in Pittsburg the Summer After You Graduate College and Everyone Will Love It

This past Sunday night I saw Adventureland(this post may act as a pseudo-spoiler, you’ve been warned). The movie was relatively enjoyable (especially the fact that the discoteque the characters go to called Razzmatazz had a marquee that read: “A Sophisticated Meeting Place”. For some reason this absolutely killed me) and I left the theatre thinking the film was ok but nothing special. I also felt like the movie should have been better, but I often feel that with these types of films. And by these types of films I mean the slow moving, indie, coming-of-age-and-falling-in-love flicks that allow their soundtracks to do the heavy lifting for the plot and characters (See: Juno, Garden State, Igby Goes Down, etc.*)

When I got home I couldn’t sleep so I started reading some reviews of the film. I always read reviews in hindsight, whether it’s a music, book, film or any other sort of review. Before I see, read or listen to something all I need is a nice, concise rating to let me judge whether or not it might be worth my time. Reviews should always be read after the fact, I feel pretty strongly about this. Anyways, as I read multiple reviews, everyone seemed to really like this movie. This didn’t surprise, but the reasons everyone really liked it did. Countless reviews I read from several credible writers talked about how the film was extraordinarily ‘deep’ for a teen comedy, and how great it was that even the side characters all had their own heartache and trauma outside the main storyline. Now I’m not a film critic, but it seems that the nation’s critics unanimously decided that this film was layered with subtext that quite frankly didn’t exist.

I think the main reason for the critical praise this film is receiving is because the vast majority of American film critics graduated from or were in college around the time this film was made. Or at the very least they remember this time period enough to properly empathize with the characters. The characters in this film are the types of people that film critics want to be, i.e. hip kids who live their lives with a sort of confined wreckless abandon, smoke lots of pot and listen to Lou Reed and the Replacements. And in fairness, this type of carefree lifestyle, at least ideologically, does sound pretty great. So there’s that, but this film is also cleverly shallow.

Just about every review I read went out of its way to mention the complexity of the supporting characters and how they all had their own little story. On the surface, this is true. In most teen comedies the characters are just archetypes with no real depth. In Adeventureland these characters are still archetypes, but they also have effed up home lives! Literally every character in this film, including the main protagonists, have some sort of travesty going on in their family lives. However, none of this personal drama is ever really expounded upon, it’s just casually mentioned or hinted at, even in the main characters case. So really all these supposed subplots are little more than a cheap way to give your characters some perceived depth. When looked at analytically, this film is little more than some shallow, self-serving nostalgia for its writer/director Greg Mottola (also known as the guy who directed Superbad). And yet, just about every critic failed to see that, which in my mind, seems kind of obvious. I think this actually the first film I’ve ever seen that I actually liked less after I saw it because of the positive reviews I l read about it post-viewing.

In some ways, this film reminded me of Michael Chabon’s first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now this novel is different from Adventureland, but they have several similarities. Both are set in Pittsburgh and follow the misadventures of a male hero in his first summer after graduating college in which he does nothing but party, fall in love and learn a little bit about himself along the way. Like Adventureland, I thought this book was marginally ok, yet it also received tons of critical acclaim. Perhaps American critics just have a soft spot for narratives that take place in Pennsylvania steel towns. Or maybe they’re just suckers for decently written coming of age stories. And maybe I’m just bitter because I’ve clearly never experienced this type of summer. Who really knows?

Until We Meet Again
* I’ve seen and enjoyed all the movies I just mentioned. F*ck