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Growing up at the water park in The Way Way Back.
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emember when you were 6? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn, you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody that?” That, you’ll recall, is Harrison Ford’s cop talking to Sean Young’s replicant in Blade Runner, cruelly revealing that her memories have been implanted and aren’t real at all. The memories being made in The Way Way Back, a well-cast but disposable coming-of-age comedy, feel no less manufactured (though much less Freudian, this being PG-13). It’s everyone’s nostalgia and no one’s, a damp, lukewarm American summer of lightly won wish fulfillment that hits the expected notes — a first kiss, a supercool adult role model, a low-impact victory over the pains of having divorced parents. It’s not set in the past, but it relies on the idea that U.S. adolescence remains suspended in what looks and sounds like July 1985. Well, doesn’t it? If that season of The Goonies and Back to the Future and Real Genius wasn’t some kind of pre-Internet multiplex zenith, nothing ever was. This fondly imprecise sense of a generation-old moment, of chlorine-scented towels at the pool and a world without bike helmets, is what the writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash — whose screenplay for 2011’s The Descendants won an Oscar — get right. (The title isn’t about time but about space — the rearmost seat in an old station wagon.) For The Descendants, the team worked from
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James and Rockwell bond. Kaui Hart Hemmings’ firmly plotted, emotionally specific novel. This time, though, there’s no source material. Not much happens in The Way Way Back, other than 14-yearold hero Duncan (Liam James) learning to straighten his geek-hunched spine a bit on the walk to manhood. In this enterprise, Duncan has an advantage that most boys don’t: Sam Rockwell, here slowing his motormouth-fuckup routine to family-friendly speed as water-slide guru Owen. Owen gives Duncan a job, then delivers gently swaggering lessons on joke telling and girls and staying up all night. In a movie set where REO Speedwagon holds more sway than Facebook, their relationship is endearing
rather than creepy, a small grace for which we can thank both actors. Toni Collette plays Duncan’s mother, Pam, as cannily self-aware, then tragically oblivious. Steve Carell plays Pam’s boyfriend as you’d expect just about any reasonably smart actor to play a salesman named Trent. Both do more than their share to suggest an actual relationship in which actual decisions may carry actual weight. But Pam and Trent are narrow ideas, not characters. They’re just more visible versions of the struggling, or else not very good, parents usually left offscreen in movies like, say, The Goonies. The kind of popcorn parents with much to learn from their teenage children, if only they’d listen. But that’s how it has always been in forgettable summer movies. ■
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OUT THIS WEEK A HIJACKING
T
here’s no hijacking scene in A Hijacking, a razor-wire Danish drama that’s otherwise as straightforward as its title. That’s just as well. Any more tension in writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s tightly wound anxiety machine would be almost physically unbearable. A ship is boarded, an office is raided from afar, but it’s the viewer who finally yields. Aboard the cargo vessel Roszen, we meet Mikkel Hartmann (Pilou Asbaek), the ship’s cook, whose wife and daughter are ready for the end of this latest voyage. Mikkel’s distant employer is shipping CEO Peter (Soren Malling), an adept dealmaker whose confidence seems absolute. We’ll see. At the home office, news arrives that the Roszen has fallen to machine-gun-toting Somali pirates. Peter wants to handle negotiations himself: “It’s my job to bring back my men.” A high ransom is met with an insult-
ing offer, translations prove tricky, and time begins its dreadful unspooling. It’s a staring contest as art, and it’s very satisfying. — S.W.
ONLY GOD FORGIVES
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icolas Winding Refn loves red: the crimson-soaked bars of Copenhagen’s underworld in Pusher II, the neon-saturated Los Angeles of Drive, the hallucinatory landscapes of Valhalla Rising. The director’s new Only God Forgives maintains that affection, along with one for elliptical storytelling, with admirable rigor. But its ease with prolonged carnage is ultimately misguided. In this campily Oedipal drama, Ryan Gosling’s Julian Thompson runs a muay Thai training gym in Bangkok but reserves his passion for monstrous-mom Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas). His brother dies in retaliation for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old prosti-
tute, and Julian is understandably reluctant to kill righteous avenger Lt. Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm). Behind Julian’s back, however, Crystal organizes reprisal. Cinematographer Larry Smith’s camera crawls unnervingly and then moves with lightning speed, showing us savage eye slittings in grindhouse close-up, samurai sword wieldings, and a nightmarish whorehouse where the hallways glow dark crimson. These individual shots seem designed as events in themselves, but they don’t acquire cumulative rhythm. Refn’s sudden jumps in location or omissions of narrative connective tissue are consistent but not intriguing. He has framed Only God Forgives with ostentatious discipline, but the movie’s transgressive urges get lost in an indiscriminate barrage of colors. — VADIM RIZOV
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on Wednesday, July 24th at 7:00pm. LIMIT ONE ADMIT-TWO PASS PER PERSON. Sponsors and their dependents are no eligible to receive a pass. Screening is overbooked to ensure capacity. Please refer to pass for any other possible restriction. No purchase necessary. All federal, state and local restrictions apply. A recipient of tickets assumes any and all risks related to the use of the tickets and accepts an restrictions required by the ticket provided. CBS Films, Allied-THA and the Pitch and their affiliates accept no responsibility or liability in connection with any loss or accident incurred in the connection with use of prize. Tickets cannot be exchanged, transferred or redeemed for cash, in whole or in part. We are not responsible if, for any reason, winner is unable to use his/her ticket in whole or in part. You must be 18 years or older to win. Rated R for pervasive strong crude and sexual content including graphic dialogue, drug and alcohol use, and language - all involving teens.
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