The Way, Way Back is out, and you should definitely go buy it if you are a hopeless romantic or a person with emotions, or even an android who can simulate emotions. It’s my most favourite film I've seen this year. Now I understand it’s not for everyone and it feels like it's been tailor made for me from a mixture of things I enjoy and things I didn't know that I would love, like Sam Rockwell as the coolest guy in the world. Can you say man crush? Yes I can, proudly and loudly.
The film is about Duncan, a young boy starting to discover himself and the wondrous world of young girls (which is only ok if you're a young boy/girl). His mum's boyfriend Trent is a horrible bastard (played by Steve Carrell remarkably well) and his mother Pam is a selfish arse. Which is compounded by her weakness for horrible men and eternal chase for someone to make her feel alive and not like a pointless waste of skin.
Apart from Trent and Pam, the collection of fuck-wits is as follows:
Betty and her children Susanna and Peter
Betty is a raging alcoholic, one of those women who drinks and bitches about everyone as a way of coping with being cheated on by her husband. I get the feeling he woke up every night and watched her breathing silently and sat holding a pillow inches away from her face for a few minutes. Probably crying with an incandescent rage before ultimately masturbating himself to sleep, suddenly aroused for the first time in months at the thought of suffocating her stupid twitching dick-trap into a thick fluffy memory foam pillow. You know, maybe.
Susanna is a lovely intelligent girl, and clearly a potential love interest from the start. She is the ‘boring’ member of her group of absolute bitches of friends, who show distaste at her preferring to read than flirt with boys and has a strange but believable bond with Duncan when he first appears. A bond that revolves around their parents’ inability to take responsibility for their actions or act like adults.
Peter is a kid with a lazy eye who has the mind, wit and confidence of a much older child despite his mother berating him every few minutes. Like a drunk, holding a Sainsbury’s bags and yelling at traffic on the motorway.
Kip and Joan
Kip and Joan are ‘the fun couple’ that remind me a bit of Hank and Marie from Breaking Bad, the only reason they are there is for Trent to fuck Joan and for Kip to move the story along by blatantly telling a character a plot point while flirting with Betty.
So Duncan, his mother Pam, and her boyfriend Trent all go on a wee trip to a cabin or house near a beach that has some pretentious name that could be interpreted as 'Midlife crisis cabin, or casa neuroses”.
Eventually Duncan come across a bike and starts exploring the town every day as an excuse to get away from the Houseschwitz he’s being made to stay in. He eventually runs into Owen, the manager of a water park near by who is my most favourite character in recent times. Everytime he appeared on screen I felt as though my life had been improved somewhat and I could only imagine how Duncan felt, a really genuine character that I found refreshing and believable.
Owen offers Duncan a job and he ends up working every day, at the park where he finds himself genuinely happy to be there, and it’s just a lovely bloody film. A real feeling of closure at the end, a wonderful story arc and a new man-crush for me made it my film of the year so far. It isn’t going to inspire any rip-offs, theme parks or merchandise and the fact that most of it’s brilliance was on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell doesn’t take away from the fact that it really was a lovely, sweet and funny film and I urge you to watch it as soon as possible.
It gets a 4/5, [★★★★☆]
Dave Roberts
The Way, Way Back at CeX
