The story opens on 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) sitting in the way, way, back of the station wagon. He’s heading off on summer vacation with his mother (Toni Colette) who tolerates everything, including her bully boyfriend, Steve Carell and his teenage daughter with attitude. When Duncan can’t fit in with anyone, he bonds with the manager of a Water Wizz Park named Owen (Sam Rockwell) and suddenly it seems like Rockwell is our hero and it’s his story.
The water park in any town Massachusetts (though shot in Marshfield) represents our need for childish antics that live on in all of us. With a mother who stays in her safety zone, and too many rules around Duncan, the water park represents a zone-free life of squirt guns and games. Of days gone by. Of life before changes. Heck, if he had his way, they wouldn’t even have to pay him to work there, he’d pay them!
As many of these films try to be – Little Miss Sunshine or The Descendants – and brought to us by the same studio, Fox Searchlight, the Way Way Back is charming, but it feels the other way around, lacking the depth of the lead roles from the other films. In The Descendants, we see life through the eyes of George Clooney, in this, young Duncan hasn’t the charisma to carry the film so the characters seem to revolve around him, though oddly enough both films were written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. Carell does a great job as being unlikable so it’s not his film to be had. Colette is a suppressed woman so she has to stifle the range we know she’s capable of from In Her Shoes. So we come to rely on Sam Rockwell and then Alison Janney, who steals the movie, as the crazy drunken sister living in the cottage next door. But even that gets old. The film touches a nerve similar to Amusement Park with a coming-of-age Jesse Eisenberg and doesn’t pick up momentum as much as sensitivity.
In a sad way, the story is so well done it’s almost too real, missing that spark. Little Miss Sunshine was a bit ‘out there’ with the crazy grandfather and the delusions of a young girl winning a beauty pageant, so while we wouldn’t have that life, we could certainly relate. This is just life in summertime, plain and simple. Divorce, affairs, step parents, and a lot of emptiness… as the child pines for his real father. ♚ ♛ 1/2