![]() ![]() ![]() When Duncan gets a job at the park, he finds a warm surrogate family to take him away from his dysfunctional real one. Girl-next-door Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb) sees something in this inarticulate blob of a kid, but Duncan doesn’t show any real signs of life until he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), the goofball proprietor of a dilapidated water park named Water Wizz. Rebounding from a divorce, Duncan’s mother Pam (Toni Collette) wants him to bond with her boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell) and Trent’s stuck-up daughter Katy (Ava Deluca-Verley), but Trent is an overbearing scold who tries too hard to assert himself as the boy’s new father. The title refers to the back-facing rear seat of an old-fashioned Buick station wagon that shuttles Duncan to summer-vacation hell. The center doesn’t hold in The Way, Way Back, and neither does the bulk of the movie, a coming-of-age comedy-drama that’s part The Ice Storm, part The Graduate, and wholly workshopped to death. It would be one thing if Duncan were merely an unformed mass of quirks and emotions, but he’s such a blank that it’s a wonder why anyone takes an interest in him, the audience included. The best he can manage is an a cappella mumbling of an REO Speedwagon song spilling out of his iPod, but among family and even sympathetic peers, it’s either monosyllabic answers or lights-out altogether. Duncan (played by Liam James) spends half the movie wearing an expression somewhere between mopey and eerily absent, as if he’s gone beyond ordinary teenage malaise and half-checked out of consciousness altogether. But Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the writer-director team behind The Way, Way Back, appear to have taken the “lump of clay” idea a bit too literally with their 14-year-old hero. It’s common to think of adolescents as lumps of clay, unshaped by experience and a true sense of self, and easily molded by whatever forces make the deepest impression. ![]()
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