One man's nostalgia may mean boredom for audience
MOVIE REVIEW
"The Wackness"
Grade: C-
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley and Olivia Thirlby. Directed by Jonathan Levine. Rated R (for pervasive drug use, language and some sexuality). At AMC Phipps and Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema. 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Bottom line: Kinda whacked comedy.
I miss nostalgia.
Remember how good remembering used to be? How much better it was back then, thinking about things even further back, and reliving the long-gone past? Well, in "The Wackness" that past is past —- and the furthest back filmmaker Jonathan Levine can look is 1994. Ah, halcyon days of "Forrest Gump," Hootie and the Blowfish, and the MLB strike.
It seems like yesterday.
Of course, to some of us it was, but to Levine it was the year of his high-school graduation —- and so his coming-of-age tale is awash in what are meant to be cultural landmarks. Remember that first Notorious B.I.G. album? The way all the girls wore those huge door-knocker earrings? "Beverly Hills, 90210"?
Well, Levine does. In fact, his film is sort of an "Upper East Side, 10021," set in a rarefied world where the bored children of dysfunctional parents spend their days acting like preps from the hood. Your enjoyment of this depends entirely on how long you can listen to overprivileged white teenagers saying, "Word, my brother!"
My limit, I discovered, was significantly short of 95 minutes.
Josh Peck —- once the antic-but-pudgy half of TV's "Drake and Josh" show —- appears, now slim-but-lethargic, as Luke Shapiro, a disaffected drug dealer. Levine clearly thinks he's written something new, but it's the same old Portrait of the Filmmaker as a Young Man —- sarcastic, surrounded by hypocritical adults and crushing madly on a girl who's ridiculously out of his league.
Basically, it's "The Graduate" —- but rolled up in a Phillies Blunt.
As alternately self-pitying and self-congratulatory as these stories usually are, it's made worse by Peck, who spends most of his scenes with his mouth hanging vacantly open, even when he's not supposed to be stoned. He looks a bit like a goldfish, gasping for air —- understandable since Petra Korner's deliberately ugly cinematography seems to have stranded everyone at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
Among those swimming fitfully are Olivia Thirlby —- so good as the best friend in "Juno," but rather wasted here as Peck's love object —- and Ben Kingsley as a dope-smoking psychiatrist with a porkpie hat, sleeveless undershirt and amorphous Brooklyn accent. (He seems to be channeling Harvey Keitel.) Mary-Kate Olsen appears, too, briefly, as a miniature clubgoer with baggy clothes and hair extensions. It's unclear if she's playing a character.
But then a lot of "The Wackness" remains unclear, and not just because of all that ganja in the air. We're never sure, for example, what Peck wants, outside of getting into Thirlby's shorts, so it's hard to cheer him on. And since all the adults are portrayed as undependable liars —- well, how can we share Peck's disappointment when they let him down?
Kingsley is weirdly watchable, and he and Famke Janssen have one unexpectedly tender scene alone. But there's no sense or sensitivity to Peck's tale. And no matter how many details Levine includes, none of it ever draws us in. It's like watching someone else look through his old high-school yearbook, smiling to himself all the while.
