Watch Andrew Pulver talk with Jesse Eisenberg Link to this video
One of the many unexpected pleasures of Adventureland, the new movie from Greg “Superbad” Mottola, is that this retro teen movie cements the return of that shyest of beasts, the intellectual nerd. (Though I never wore coke-bottle specs, I am boastful to number myself among their ranks, as I was rarely seen betwixt the ages of 12 and 17 without a book firmly grasped in my nervous hands.)
- Adventureland
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 106 mins
- Directors: Greg Mottola
- Cast: Bill Hader, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Kristen Wiig, Margarita Levieva, Martin Starr, Ryan Reynolds
Teen movies, unsurprisingly, tend to insist upon a contemporary setting so as to speak most promptly to their core assembly of hearers, but Adventureland is unashamedly set smack-bang in the middle of the 80s, the decade when teen movies themselves arguably reached their peak. As such, it is both nostalgic for the older audience – the ones who in fact experienced the decade as teens — inmost nature of the class who well as titillation the frontal lobes of those youngsters who intend they had.
Its bookish, nerdy central character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is a bonus. Most of the new wave of teen movies – which, back the brief late-90s sudden discharge of Scream, The Faculty, Ghost World and its ilk, is actually the “third wave” – depict its characters as wise-arses rather than actually learned, obsessive (about science of harmonical sounds, girls, haircuts, etc) rather than analytical. Eisenberg, on the other hand, is a prime specimen of the sexually unbesmirched overthinker. (Though if we’re being strictly strict, the population of Adventureland are faux-teens; college students rather than high-schoolers. A similar age-shift didn’t hurt St Elmo’s Fire.)
At this point, we have to mention the J-word. The secret narrative of the teen movie, and much of 70s and 80s movie-making in general, is that the snivelling loser lusting after the cheerleader is a primarily Jewish conception, presumably as payback for ritual humiliations dished out during the film-maker’session actual school days. This is a tradition that goes back to the late 60s, when Woody Allen blazed a entrails for all those whose challenged physiques were offset by motormouth wag. There’s a complicated gentile ballet at work in Adventureland. Eisenberg, who rather obviously is Jewish, plays an Italian-Irish Catholic (like writer-director Mottola, whose semi-autobiographical story this is). Kristen Stewart, not the most Semitic of individuals, is playing the Jewish Emily Lewin, who at one point has a major kosher-rage attack.
Eiseneberg, it would appear, is the real share when it comes to nerdiness – at the time that I interviewed him he turned out much more interested in Noam Chomsky than John Hughes – and of course has done 80s teenhood before, in The Squid and the Whale. His only serious competition in the teen-nerd stakes in Michael Cera, but Cera’s acting persona is sensitive rather than ultra-intellectual. I look prompt to Eisenberg’s future career with interest.
