In the car on the way home from "Adventureland" - the movie, not the theme park - I had to ask myself, "Was I that stupid when I graduated from college?"

Granted, that's not even been a full two years ago, so I remember it fairly well. And I don't think there's any way I could even begin to relate to the naivete of the cast in the film I'd just seen.

Our "hero" (I'm air-quoting), James (Jesse Eisenberg), takes a job at the local amusement park after his dad takes a pay cut and can't afford to send him off to Europe for the summer.

James has graduated with a degree in comparative literature and not much else. When he fell out of the common-sense tree, he missed every branch on the way down.

Allow me to illustrate. During his time in college, the only job he works is at a literature magazine. He takes a letter of recommendation to a restaurant - from a neighbor whose lawn he used to mow. Though he thinks he's in love with one girl, he lets an older, "wiser" guy talk him into going on a date with his hot co-worker because he's "wired" to want to get on her.

Really? Did we learn nothing in college? Or life? At the start of the movie, he gets his heart broken - by a girl he's been dating for 11 days.

Some of the other characters are a little more interesting - Kristen Stewart's Em is genuinely conflicted and a case for empathy; Frigo (played by the deadpan son from those commercials about the rollover minutes!) is at least a little nutty - and others aren't, like Joel, the nerdy co-worker who really needs some new glasses and more than one pair of burgundy pants.

As I watched the movie, I really felt like there must be this huge, blatantly obvious piece of symbolism I was missing. Was the amusement park a metaphor for life? Does a child throwing up on your work station provide an allegory to what life does to college graduates who have their heads up their, uh, rears?

But I couldn't find anything, no grander motive than telling a super-awkward love story super-awkwardly set in the '80s. The time period is mainly an excuse to let Kristen Wiig have fantastically terrible hair and let people dress in spandex outside the gym. Kristen Stewart's outfits looked like modern pieces with a retro edge, hip enough that impressionable tweens are probably copying them right now.

The '80s gambit does have the effect of keeping the film from feeling too much like a buddy comedy. Instead, the movie is really "complex" because it's in a time period different from our own, a time when things were harder. Sob, sob.

I don't know. Maybe I missed the entire point. Maybe you'll like the movie better than I did. The characters got drunk and stoned a lot, mostly to forget the fact they work at a crappy amusement park. I'd like to forget about the movie I just watched about a bunch of people at a crappy amusement park trying to forget they work at a crappy amusement park.