Cast on cusp of adolescence sets coming-of-age film apart
ABOUT 10 minutes into The Way, Way Back, young Duncan (Liam James) reaches into his jacket pocket, and pulls out a pair of white iPod earphones. It came as a surprise, because until that moment, I thought I was watching a film set in the mid-1980s.
Potential stepdad Trent (Steve Carell) is driving a perfectly restored-era station wagon, and all of the cast are wearing the exact same chinos/jeans/plaid and T-shirt combinations that every American movie family going on a summer holiday in the past 40 years has worn. If you pulled out a DVD of Jaws – a film set in a near identical beachside holiday village to the one shown here – you wouldn’t notice any significant differences in the characters’ wardrobe. It may seem like a small point to make, but it’s only one of several signifiers that writer/directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash are quite deliberately giving a nod to the classic adolescent-comes-of-age films of the 1970s and 80s.
When we first meet Sam Rockwell’s Owen, the wellmeaning eternal teenager who will take Duncan under his wing, he is playing on a Pac-man machine. Not a smartphone app Pac-man, but a genuine 1980s put-a-dime-inthe-slot standup machine, in a diner.
Likewise, the water park that Rockwell works at ‘‘hasn’t been changed since 1983’’, he tells Duncan. Later in the film, Duncan will repeat the line, just to make sure we cloth-eared doofuses in the audience have got the point. Yep, we get it.
The Way, Way Back is a film about embracing your past, cunningly dressed up to look like a film about overcoming your present. Which, I guess, makes it a film about both, which is going to hold a lot of appeal for a lot of people.
There is just so much to like here. As the adult leads, Carell, Collette and Rockwell really couldn’t be bettered. Carell is cast, for the first time in memory, as an absolutely loathsome character. His Trent is an oily, bullying, duplicitous creep. There’s enough glib superficial charm there to make him briefly attractive to Collette’s struggling single mother, but we know that Trent will get his come-uppance, and we wait happily for it to arrive.
Collette likewise is layered and subtle in a role a lesser actor, or script, could have made shrill and demeaning.
But, as with Faxon and Nash’s screenplay for The Descendants, (they co-wrote with director Alexander Payne), it’s the kids who set this film apart. Faxon and Nash place their young cast right on the cusp of adolescence, and then allow the events of one summer to push them across the line. We know that this is a coming-of-age yarn, and we perhaps know how it will unfold, but The Way, Way Back is generously and insightfully done.
The film might not have quite the emotional heft or ambition of The Descendants, but it is still a captivating and often very funny couple of hours. Very recommended.
GEMMA ARTERTON and Saoirse Ronan are mother and daughter vampires. We don’t know this at first. In fact, we’d assume that Ronan is the shy and studious younger sister to Arterton’s brassy and fearless pole-dancing sociopath. But, as is the way of vampire yarns, they have each been alive for something over 200 years, and the relationship between them is fraught with old betrayals and resentments.
Director Neil Jordan should know this territory well. He has Interview With a Vampire on his CV after all. And, despite the diabolically stupid casting of Tom Cruise as the chief neck-sucker, that film is holding up surprisingly well.
Byzantium starts its tale in modern-day London, where the two undead women are kept busy by the demands of feeding, and of staying ahead of a mysterious rival coven who clearly wish them no good. The action switches back and forth across the centuries, and we begin to understand how Arterton and Ronan have come to find themselves in this fix.
The pair flee to a British seaside town, and move into an old rundown hotel, and the film is immediately in territory – both physical and emotional – very familiar to anyone who remembers Jordan’s Mona Lisa.
This is a stylish and occasionally quite enjoyable film. Ronan and Arterton are both committed to their work, with Arterton in particular running and jumping and hitting things like a good’un, all while trapped in costumes that threaten to have her knocked off the screen by her own cleavage.
It’s been a while since a big screen vampire yarn was anything other than an adolescent yawn fest. Byzantium is no Let the Right One In or Near Dark, but it’ll do until the next decent one comes along.
ONLY a few days left to run. Twenty Feet From Stardom, We Steal Secrets, The Great Beauty, and Toa Fraser’s film of the New Zealand ballet and Giselle are all hugely recommended. Go see something.