Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (2013)
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, with Alexander Payne, won an undeserved Oscar for writing The Descendants. Now Faxon and Rash, independently of Payne, have written and made together The Way Way Back, their first feature as co-directors. The title may refer, as Jonathan Kiefer suggests, to the protagonist Duncan’s place at the rear of a vast Buick en route to a small seaside town in Cape Cod. The Buick is being driven by Trent, the new boyfriend of fourteen-year-old Duncan’s mother Pam. (Trent is a car salesman and therefore unlikely to be a good guy.) Taciturn, awkward, miserable Duncan, who would rather be spending the summer with his father, sits as far away as possible from the other three people in the car – the third of them is Trent’s daughter Steph – but he’s not out of range of Trent’s needling questions. (‘How do you rate yourself – on a scale of 1 to 10?’ Duncan eventually comes up with a six. ‘I think you’re a three’, decides Trent.)
I wonder if the title also acknowledges the movie’s mixed-up nostalgic aspects. I read online that Faxon and Rash originally intended their story to be set in the 1980s and they’ve not entirely abandoned that idea. Duncan finds refuge from the brew of discomfort and tension in and around Trent’s beach house at a local water park, Water Wizz. He’s told by the manager Owen, who takes a liking to Duncan, that Water Wizz is three decades old and deliberately unchanged from the way it was designed by the man who started it. One of Owen’s staff is the droll, fey Lewis – the joke about him is that he’s always threatening to leave Water Wizz but never does. Jim Rash, who was just about Duncan’s age thirty years ago, plays Lewis. Nat Faxon, who’s five years younger, plays another assistant, Roddy, an unashamed big kid. The surprising rarity of iPhones, especially among the adolescents, also suggests that Faxon and Rash haven’t thoroughly updated their screenplay. The Way Way Back is old-fashioned in another sense too: the kids’ miseries are all the fault of the grown-ups, who seem to have only themselves to blame for their own failures and unhappiness.
The story is summer-I-grew-up formulaic and it’s inevitable that Duncan will learn how to live life not from Trent – a treacherous lech as well as a pompous bully and control freak – but from his polar opposite Owen, an essentially honourable scamp with dry wit to burn. Faxon and Rash have some very talented people on board – Steve Carell as the vile Trent, Toni Collette as the confused, borderline feckless Pam, Allison Janney as Betty, a hysterically jolly dipso from the beach house next door. All three give their characters more depth and variety than the smartly written dialogue and the facile plotting deserve. I can’t get enthusiastic about Sam Rockwell but, as Owen, he certainly delivers what the directors want. The underused Maya Rudolph is excellent as Owen’s girlfriend Caitlyn – warm, exasperated and the only Water Wizz employee with an emotional age in advance of the place’s teenage clientele. Liam James as Duncan is sympathetic not least because he’s been asked to shoulder rather too much. James’ physical tension, and moments of release from it, are good. Zoe Levin is Steph; the other youngsters are Betty’s kids Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), with whom Duncan teeters on the brink of a relationship, and Peter (River Alexander), whose lazy eye is the subject of at least two jokes too many. The cast also includes Amanda Peet and Rob Cordrry. The Way Way Back is termed a comedy-drama. Nnot unusually, it simply alternates the two elements most of the time. I thought perhaps its best sequence was when they were combined, in an excruciating board game, which Trent, Pam, Duncan and Steph play while confined to barracks by heavy rain. The film didn’t make me laugh often but it’s no doubt doing well commercially because it has a more positive effect on many other people. It also seems to be getting reviews rather better than it deserves but The Way Way Back is unlikely to be overrated in the same award-winning way as The Descendants. Partly because of this, I preferred it to Alexander Payne’s movie.
30 August 2013
