Film Review: The Wackness
I had the opportunity to see The Wackness tonight at the SF International Film Festival.
It was great. That may sound trite, but in this case, “great” constitutes “big” and “bold” in same way that an adventure or a road trip is “great”. The Wackness is the first great road trip into what I like to call The Identity-Crysis Decade (that hasn’t been coined yet, has it?), where American teens struggle to identify with anything . Generation Why was a generation thrown out to fend for itself while their Baby Boomer parents struggled to cope with their own mid-life crises.
Josh Peck plays a 17 year old kid, a drug dealer, who finishes high school, and missed being a teenager. Never had many friends, never had a girlfriend, never had sex. He wasn’t your typical shallow kid, but a profoundly intimate kid, with legitimate dreams and aspirations. When he and his parents are facing eviction, he’s forced to be both the kid trying to grow up and the parent trying to stay young. He’s helped through this when he develops a connection with his shrink and client, Dr. Jeffrey Squires (or Geoffrey if you saw his diploma).
Dr. Squires is the middle-aged baby boomer, who sees in Shapiro what he simultaneously saw in himself, a kid who didn’t know how to deal with adulthood.
They lean on each other and use the opportunity to grow, and to learn about themselves through their relationship. Their adventure is one with ups and downs, with sad realizations, and happy discoveries. In the end growing up is just another part of living, and they both make that very clear.
As a debut film, there is no doubt that Jonathan Levine’s intimate, personal memoir of the 1990s, the identity that all Americans tried so desperately to unearth, was perfectly portrayed through the life of a Generation Why teenager and a Baby Boomer adult. The script was well-written, and the acting by veteran Sir Ben Kingsley (who I would never have cast in this role, but I was proven wrong), and an eager young star Josh Peck was equally provocative. The Wackness (unlike Juno, see my review of it) is an example of a film that is independent…in thought - that you can take a period that is so hard to understand and to give it some meaning through the eyes of two people who helped define it. The direction was likewise very well done with great use of lighting and filters, perfectly framed shots, a great soundtrack, and characters who were fresh and exciting. The pop culture references got a little heavy-handed, but they weren’t enough to change my opinion of the film.
I look forward to tons more great work from the cast and crew of this film. Definitely see it this July!
3 months ago