The Way, Way Back is a coming-of-age drama which follows a veritable “loser” kid, Duncan (played by Liam James), and his somewhat-dysfunctional family on their Summer vacation to Cape Cod. While there, they meet some similarly dysfunctional families (mostly bad parents), a “cool” dude who pays way more attention to the “loser” kid than he should, and a water park which raises more questions than it should.
This film is also tagged as Comedy for some reason, but other than the handful of jokes you would expect in almost any film, I don’t believe it did anything to deserve that tag.
The stand-out aspect of this film is the writing, but not for the right reasons. A debut piece for the writer/director duo, (and not a duo I intend to follow) who I can only assume watched every coming-of-age film they could ahead of writing The Way, Way Back and made the decision to write exactly the same thing again. Now, “coming-of-age” is far from my preferred genre, and this film reminded me exactly why that is the case; many scenes felt horribly cliché and the plot was incredibly predictable. It’s almost refreshing that the film leaves most of its major plot points unresolved, but in hindsight that was worse than the few plot points it did resolve in an incredibly predictable manner. Either things work out for characters despite minimal effort on their part, or things are left unresolved in a cliff-hanger-like way – which might be exciting if you were more invested in the film, but I was left frustrated by.
Some elements are well done within the script, the “cool” character (Owen, played by Sam Rockwell) is done fairly well. Whilst the “growth” the character goes through is a little rushed and a little forced, his personality is set-up efficiently and stays consistent with audience expectations throughout.
Almost every significant character is flawed in some way, though often these flaws define the character so wholly that it becomes difficult to understand their situation. For example, Duncan’s mother (played by Toni Collette) shows little to no regard for her son’s wellbeing, often not caring that she has no idea where he is for an entire day, and one full night too at one point. This makes it extremely difficult to be sympathetic to her plight during one of the climactic twists of the film.
Because the writing comes across as so generic (I don’t want to call it terrible, just terribly boring) it’s difficult to evaluate a lot of the other points of the film. The acting was probably pretty good in general. Steve Carell (as Trent, Duncan’s mom’s new boyfriend) does a good job at playing “the bad guy” of the film and comes across as a very believable bully who pretends to care. Sam Rockwell gives a solid and consistent performance, being very believable even during emotionally contrasting moments for his character. Carell and Rockwell are two of the highlights in this film, which is almost a shame as two of the biggest names in the cast, but that’s how you become a big name.
The teenage performances are masked by the cliché writing. Though they might be accurate to how teenagers act, the stereotypical journeys that they go through caused me to lose interest in their characters and makes it difficult for me to evaluate their performances.
The cinematography in this film is mostly fine, but the most memorable moments are ones of poor cinematography. The amount of times Duncan hides in direct eyeshot of another character is bewildering, but even more bewildering is the choice to have the climatic finale of the film (which is incredibly poorly set up) inside a water slide. We don’t see the inside of the water slide, the camera “follows” the action inside the opaque waterslide from outside the waterslide. There’s not even any dialogue or sound effects, it’s just music played over a camera following the path of a waterslide. In context it’s pretty nonsensical, so I can only imagine what anyone reading this is picturing. I’m also bewildered by their choice of finale, it’s an event which is mentioned approximately twice throughout the film, and is used to set up a joke both those times anyway. It’s not a major plot element, it’s not something which needed to be resolved, it feels like a throwaway “running gag” which was made into the finale due to a lack of any better ideas.
The other bit of cinematography which stood out to me is Duncan’s transition from an incredibly pale “loser” kid, to a well-tanned kid with confidence. Whilst the transition from pale to tanned would be a nice way of symbolising his journey, you’d think that this would be done gradually over the film’s length. I can only assume they didn’t have the budget for more than 2 skin tones, so Duncan goes from completely pale to perfect tan in one scene. This also raises the issue that any indoors kid who is as pale as Duncan starts would absolutely go bright pink as they burned immediately from any contact with direct sunlight (there is never any mention of sunscreen); not turn a beautiful golden colour overnight.
Actually, I’m not sure how long that change takes, there is no sense of time in the film. It appears to go a day at a time, (with time skips during the day but not explicitly skipping whole days) but near the end of the film we see Duncan has won Employee of the Month – which suggests they have been there for over a month as he didn’t get he job on the first day they arrived. Having looked up American vacations, summer break is approximately 3 months long. So whilst this is entirely possible it does raise the question about what his mom and her boyfriend do for a living, as apparently they’re both able to take over a month off work – they don’t even mention “work” at any point during the film.
I’m impressed at the amount of questions The Way, Way Back manages to raise considering its cookie-cutter approach to the coming-of-age genre, and I’m shocked it rates as highly as it does. The few snippets from reviewers I have read seem to have watched a different film to me as they praise its lack of clichés, whilst I cannot remember a more clichéd film. If “coming-of-age” is your favourite genre, The Way, Way Back is probably a good way to spend 2 hours; but if, like me, you’re more interested in the Comedy/Drama side of it, then you can do so much better than this film.
- Cinematography – 4/10
- Plot – 2/10
- Acting – 5/10
- Script – 3/10
- Enjoyment* – 2/10
OVERALL – 3.2/10
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