The second-coming-of-age movie

ADVENTURELAND. THE GRADUATE. No this is not a post about a new coming-of-age movie about a 16-year-old boy who just wants to be a normal kid, but in addition to having an overworked single mother and absent father, he know has to come to terms with saving the world from sin. Although now I am imaging the second-coming involved in all sorts of roles, like the obvious Saved! in a from a few years ago in a gender-reversal situation, or possibly just J.C. himself singing "Somebody to Love (eternally)" with the kids from Glee.

But I digress. One of the most common storytelling archetypes is the coming-of-age story and the trend continues in film -- including in very two different way in a couple of this year's most discussed offerings, An Education and Precious (I would suggest staying tuned to this station for more on these in the coming days). My topic here is a less common, younger sibling that I'm calling the second coming of age. If the first occurrence comes with a young person realizing he/she is struggling to become an adult, the second occurs generally when the protagonist realizes -- generally post-college -- the reverse, that the grown-up world is not all its cracked up to be and perhaps he/she is not prepared for the world of adulthood. Having been through that time, and having less-than-fulfilling work in the immediate years after school, the topic has a certain resonance and I think I would say I'm a pretty good judge of their accuracy. Perhaps you are the same way. I would argue that this phenomenon itself has been growing for our generation as a whole, which is why I find it surprising that not just the best movie, but the most relevant movie was made in the 1960s: The Graduate (trailer).

Honestly the point of this movie is to write about how great that movie is an how miserable I am that no film since has captured that topic as well. Granted it is probably unfair to compare other movies to Mike Nichol's classic. Although most famous for its Mrs. Robinson plotline, a career-making performance by Dustin Hoffman, and a memorable soundtrack, what elevates the film from being simply a well-made, clever film to a cultural touchstone is how accurately it captures the theme. Nichol astutely chose to cast Hoffman instead of a WASPish actor as the novel depicts and crafts the story of a young man discovering he is out of place in his own community, his own family, and his own life. He finds himself in the situation he does because he is so lost and although I was neither alive in the 1960s nor dated one of my parents' friends, I can feel a great sense of empathy for Benjamin. Without quality filmmaking, it could have crossed over that dangerous line from honest and engaging to earnest. The Graduate triumphs because it never wallows in Benjamin's situation -- instead of hearing him whine about feeling out of place, we get to see him jump into a swimming pool in a diving pool surrounded by his parents' friends on his birthday. There is an actual story that exposes the themes of the movie instead of allowing the setup of a struggling post-college man dictate the events. That's what makes the movie timeless and after seeing it for the first time a few years ago, I could have been sworn it was written about my generation, not one older than my parents'.

Which brings me to the recent film, Adventureland (trailer), that prompted this post. It focuses on the same time in a young man's life but otherwise shares little more than the protagonist's nearly crippling awkwardness. Like Benjamin, James (Jesse Eisenberg -- or as I have heard him described, the guy they get when they can't afford Michael Cera) has just graduated from college but instead of departing on an engaging storyline, we simply have him dumped in an amusement park with mildly amusing characters as he whines about his predicament and looks to possibly lose his virginity with that fang-banger girl, Kristen Stewart. Benjamin is a character lost because he doesn't know how to fit in once he has left college, whereas I found myself watching James' interactions and wondering how he was functional enough to survive college socially. What 22-year-old does not think it is going to be a problem to go out on a date with a girl from work while trying to date another coworker? Or tell a girl in the first 10 minutes of a date about his (lack of) sexual experience? Sure this movie might be functionally a comedy (one could say the same about The Graduate, though), but there are too many scenes -- especially the last -- where it unsuccessfully walks that Apatowian line of funny movie with an emotional core to fully discount its attempts to be something more meaningful.

If Adventureland moves too much toward comedy, perhaps a closer relative is Garden State (trailer), a more serious movie that was commonly compared to The Graduate following its 2004 release. I personally remember it most for being a lot better than I expected, although in all honesty I thought it was going to be McAwful. Essentially it is the same setup as the aforementioned films except that the main character has taken a longer hiatus from home -- a good portion of high school and then a mostly failed attempt at acting that puts him at his mid-20s, I think -- and touches on the contemporary issues of psychology and overmedication, not to mention grief. Zach Braff, who wrote, directed and starred, does an affable job at building a mood and a good collection of scenes, but so much of it is too convenient and comes across as a film-school attempt. Although in many ways not as outlandish as Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Robinson, so much of the movie seems much less believe and built around making us see Andrew's isolation. This comes to a head in the final scene as well that swerves way too far into melodrama.

Which brings me around to my final conclusion about The Graduate is that by being more detached emotionally from what happens to its main character, it tells a much better story. The final scene of that movie is one of the more memorable of its decade, unlike the other two movies that left me wondering if even the good parts of the movie were supposed to be a build-up to an overly emotional crescendo. Contemporary film -- both in the large-scale action movies and especially the smaller, independent movies -- have been marked this decade by an emphasis on realism, frequently by borrowing aspects of documentary films. This often results in a detachment of the morality or the emotion from the plotline and allows the viewers to make judgments instead of the dialogue and the triumphant music doing it for them. Right now would be a perfect time for The Graduate to have been made (originally -- I am not advocating a remake!) and perhaps that is why it feels much more contemporary than either of those more recent films.