The Way, Way Back (2013)

Film: The Way, Way Back
Stars: Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, AnnaSophia Robb, Sam Rockwell, Maya Rudolph, Liam James
Director: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Independent comedies are not what one would consider my cup-of-tea.  I was not a fan of Little Miss Sunshine.  I have never remotely understood the appeal of Christopher Guest (and I have tried on multiple occasions).  I can take or leave Wes Anderson.  Parker Posey is a fine actress, but I only really adore her from her brief comedic guest spots on sitcoms rather than her film work.

For me the reason that I don’t like this style of filmmaking is that they get far too formulaic for me.  I find myself knowing exactly where the movie is going to take me.  The quirky, though of course never completely unattractive young man falls in love with an alternative girl who gets rejected by her friends (and in her case, she is almost offensively attractive, but for some reason no one notices because she doesn’t wear a Miu Miu top and spend her afternoons at Sephora).  He has to prove himself, probably having an oddly close relationship with a dysfunctional adult, and finds that he was really awesome to begin with, and the fact that he listens to 80’s or early 90’s rock (it used to be 70’s rock-they at least update the music) and wears quirky outfits just makes him special.

Okay, yes, I’m aware that this sounds super snarky, and probably not the best way to start the first review I do after The Bling Ring, which celebrates the shallow and the vapid, but at least The Bling Ring is honest.  Spoken as one of those formerly quirky and outcast teenagers, you typically have to wait until college if you have a town that doesn’t celebrate your love of old movies and 1960’s Motown and memorizing backbench senators (...hypothetically).

That being said, I’m not completely against Indy comedies, and occasionally they’re quite lovely.  Juno, for example, gets better every time you see it, and though the references will become horribly dated as the years go by, the star performances of Ellen Page, Jennifer Garner, and Alison Janney don’t wear a bit.  Because of the hard formulaic nature of these movies, we are reliant on characters, and in particular, actors, that we can relate toward.  This is how sitcoms, for example, succeed or fall-you need your Neil Patrick Harrises, your Jennifer Anistons, your Kaley Cuocos that can make an instant and immediate connection with the viewers at home, particularly if we've seen this format before.

The Way, Way Back (yes, the film I insinuated three paragraphs ago I’d review) does this to a certain extent.  For starters, they brilliantly cast Alison Janney in a side role, and Alison Janney makes everything better.  Seriously-find me one thing that she doesn’t vastly improve.  She knows how to use her statuesque beauty, her abrasively cutting vocal prowess, and her too short screen time to perfect effect.  I found myself not just laughing at her jokes, but after a while, laughing preemptively because she was about to be onscreen, horribly insulting her son, and throwing herself inappropriately at any man in her way (married or not).  Why the hell did Cameron Diaz get hired over her to play Miss Hannigan, I'll never know.

It’s a funny conundrum, oddly enough, that she is so cruel to her son, but it never comes across in the wicked way that Steve Carell, who plays the boyfriend to our hero Duncan’s (James) mother.  Carell’s Trent is nasty-calling out his girlfriend’s son in a brazenly over-the-top way.  There’s certainly a realism in the way Carell approaches the way he cuts down the young man-adults, and people, can definitely be cruel, but I found that the complete turnabout to Colette, whom I wish someone would challenge as a character other than a mousy, overextended mother at the movies again, to cross the line into cartoonish.  It’s impossible to imagine Colette’s mother so completely abandoning her son to the vicious barbs being thrown by Carell’s Trent.  That is, of course, the difference between Janney and Carell-Janney is always coming from a place of caring, which the audience notices.  It’s just funny how on paper they are oddly similar despite the approach.

Carell’s performance left me cold as a result of the cartoonish villainy he hits (he’s a very good actor, and I love the idea of him playing a cruel character, but the script doesn’t do him enough favors or give enough explanation as to why he, say, cuts down his stepson-to-be but his own daughter is not only free from the insults, but has grown up with an uber-confidence that doesn’t fit someone who had been belittled her own life).   Collette’s, and by extension James’s, performance is too wimpy, too uninvolved, to relate to the quirkiness and brokenness that Faxon and Rash are trying to get across in the characters.

No, the only actor that matches Janney moment-for-moment onscreen (making it a sheer pity they never share a scene) is Sam Rockwell.  Unlike Janney, I’m not a persistent fan of Rockwell’s, though I have found myself more and more inclined to him over the years (particularly in comedy, which he has a knack for).  Yes, his Owen is the same hapless loser with a heart of gold you typically encounter in such films, but he plays Owen so brilliantly, so full of confidence and charisma, you actually believe that everyone in the film would in fact fall for him and want to gravitate toward him.  It’s probably due to even when he’s having his “broken” moments, he never becomes someone else-adults don’t change as easily or as quickly as they do in the movies, and it’s nice to see that while Rockwell gets up early and helps out, he doesn’t totally abandon himself along with his far more adaptive younger friend.

So, yes, I found the film enjoyable enough to be a three-star affair, and thanks to Janney’s and Rockwell’s performances, it’s worth the investment, but I do wish that the mainstream independent comedy (an oxymoron, but you know exactly what I’m talking about) would step outside of its comfort zone.  Have the generational gap be not so large, perhaps?  Or have one of the protagonists be female or a person of color or gay?  Just something to throw this dynamic off so that we can better appreciate such a limitless format without such a narrow lens.