Back in 2011 Jim Rash and Nat Faxon shared a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar with director Alexander Payne for his George Clooney-starring The Descendants. That film was a rousing success, earning rave reviews, winning all kinds of awards, launching the career of young actress Shailene Woodley, humanizing Clooney during a period where the public was starting to see him as being too cold and intellectual, and even giving Rash a chance to show off his lovely, long legs at the Academy Awards. With The Way, Way Back Rash and Faxon have once again teamed up on writing duties, but this time around they’re also sitting in the director’s chair(s), and they’re telling a more personal story. What results is a movie that has just as much heart and humor as their work in The Descendants, but that lacks the pedigree that comes from an A-list star like Clooney and an auteur director like Payne. What this means is the film is getting a much smaller release, far fewer marketing dollars directed toward its promotion, and it needs us to come out and support it much more than The Descendants did, if we want talented people like Rash and Faxon to be able to keep making movies.
If that sounds a little melodramatic, probably it is, but the fact is that The Way, Way Back is the sort of smart, heart-filled comedy aimed at coming-of-age teenagers that seemed to be a staple of Hollywood’s summer releases during the days of my childhood, but that you don’t see much of in this age of dubstep soundtracks and extended party sequences—and it’s the sort of film young people would benefit from seeing a lot more of. It stars Liam James as an awkward teen named Duncan who’s forced to spend the summer at his mom’s (Toni Collette) asshole boyfriend, Trent’s, (Steve Carell) beach house, which seems to be situated in a community where adults in arrested development can go to drink and carouse, and where their children become little more than an afterthought. Predictably, this is a situation fraught with awkwardness and tension, and it leads to a growing, shared resentment between Duncan and Trent that’s always threatening to boil over. Some relief comes in the form of a summer job Duncan lands at a local water park thanks to the help of the business’ slacker manager, Owen (Sam Rockwell), however. Water Wizz gives Duncan an environment where he feels included for maybe the first time in his life, and thanks to that inclusion and the protective bubble it provides from Trent’s passive aggressive putdowns, it allows him to finally break out of his awkward, mopey shell and reach a state that more closely resembles self-actualization.
Before all of the praise being piled up in heaps here gets too deep, we should probably address that fact that The Way, Way Back isn’t a perfect film. From where I’m sitting, it seemed to have two main problems, and they were that Duncan was a little bit difficult to relate to as a protagonist, and Rash and Faxon have a bit more of a difficult time juggling the humor with the dramatic stuff than they did when they were collaborating with Payne on The Descendants, so some missteps in tone pop up here and there.
First up, let’s talk about Duncan. James is fine for a young actor, and does a good job in the role, but for the first half of the film the character is such a mopey killjoy that it becomes a challenge for the audience to really get behind his eventual turnaround. Sure, the transition from sad to happy is the entire arc that this character study takes, so it needed to be firmly established and featured, but Rash and Faxon’s screenplay goes so far toward making him a depressive in the first act that they make things harder for themselves than they needed to come the third. This is a character I felt a personal connection to, once being a brooding-prone kid who had to go through the embarrassment of being dragged through a divorced parent’s new relationship during formative years myself, but at my black-wearing, headphone-sporting worst I was never as miserable a little killjoy as this twerp—and that’s saying something. It almost gets to the point where you want to give up on him and have the film change focus. Almost.
His absolute frowny-faced refusal to have fun with anything sabotages a romantic subplot, as well. This being a coming-of-age movie, it’s probably a prerequisite that it needed to feature a first romance, and the one that we get here ends up feeling like exactly that—a prerequisite that the filmmakers dutifully included but weren’t really all that interested in. AnnaSophia Robb plays the love interest—a pretty, older girl staying next store who becomes interested in Duncan because he’s not like everyone else living in this vacation bubble. The problem is that she’s so pretty and so much older, and he’s such an awkward little wet noodle, that her interest in him just never rings true. Thankfully, this romantic subplot is treated very much like a subplot though, because the mentor/student relationship Duncan shares with Owen is far more effective, and it smartly gets the bulk of the film’s focus.
The other problem here is that the adult characters are so thoughtless toward their children, and so over-the-top in their salacious behavior, that they become more absolute in their villainy than they should have been, and it undercuts the authenticity of the drama a bit. This isn’t such a big problem though, because it’s mostly relegated to the side characters. Carell’s Trent is a selfish jerk, for sure, and Collette’s mother character is spineless enough to become pretty selfish as well, but they’re good enough actors and their motivations get fleshed out enough that the characters are at least three-dimensional, if not relatable. The other adult characters, played by actors like Allison Janney, Rob Corddry, and Amanda Peet, are pretty terrible people. They make fun of their kids’ disabilities, do drugs around them, and generally put all of their focus on their juvenile social calendars and none on their children’s wellbeing. It’s true that a lot of dark humor gets mined from all of this stuff, and Janney in particular is hilarious delivering it, but things get so broadly comedic that it starts to feel like Rash and Faxon are working in service of the gag rather than in service of crafting authentic characters.
Like I said, these are side characters though, so the problem doesn’t seem so major given all of the great work done with the main four or so who get the focus. The acting in this movie is great, with Carrell and Rockwell in particular being really effective in their roles. Carell’s Trent isn’t a terrible guy in his heart. He’s just a bit of a narcissist who’s thoroughly uninterested in raising a kid who isn’t his own, and while some of the things that come out of his mouth are completely appalling, Carrell is always able to keep you aware of the fact that his behavior most likely stems from past traumas rather than from senseless cruelty. There is a palpable sensation of awkwardness whenever Duncan and Trent are left alone together, to the point where their scenes match anything Carrell did in early seasons of The Office a far as cringe-factor goes, and this can definitely be counted among the best acting work Carell has done as a result.
The true star of the film is Rockwell though. He’s made something of a habit of stealing movies as of late, and The Way, Way Back is certainly no exception to that rule. There are a ton of laughs here, to the point where this is probably the best comedy of 2013 so far, and the bulk of them just come from Rockwell’s Owen goofing off and being a slacker miscreant. Or maybe miscreant is a bad word, given all of the insight Owen shows and the kindness he offers Duncan. There’s a certain zen to this character, deliberately patterned after the nihilist heroes Bill Murray played early in his career (and especially in Meatballs), and Rockwell may be doing early Murray better than even Murray ever did (my favorite Murray has always been late Murray, when the sadness started to creep in). His “I need a hero” speech is especially inspired. If this universe is at all just, Owen is a character who young people will be quoting for many decades to come.
The biggest reason the film succeeds is that you actually get behind all of the sappy, sentimental stuff though. The plot is pretty paint by numbers, so you can see where Duncan’s story is heading from a mile away, and Rash and Faxon didn’t do any favors by making the kid so unlikable in the first act, but James is such a strong actor and the stuff later in the film is so well-written that, once all of the big confrontations and cathartic realizations begin, they hit you like neutron bombs. Wimpier members of the filmgoing public can definitely expect to cry. And seeing as the tears will come after likely the most laughs we’ve gotten out of a movie this year, The Way, Way Back has a real good chance of becoming one of those special movies about growing up that stand the test of time and get passed down from one generation to the next. All of that is dependent on us going out and supporting it in theaters now though, so it can become a big enough hit to get on people’s radars. Don’t be a jerk. Get out there and do your part.
