The Way Way Back 2013

[8.4/10] There are two competing brands of masculinity in The Way, Way Back. There is Trent’s brand, which is confrontational, full of false bravado, and above all disingenuous. It’s built on knocking other people down, pumping yourself up, and refusing to accept responsibility for even your most dishonest and unforgivable moments.

Then there is Owen’s brand, which is amiable, full of jocular shtick in lieu of genuine self-congratulation, and deceptively earnest and empathetic despite a certain comic facade. It’s built on nudging but ultimately lifting up those in his orbit, using his limited power to encourage people in his own sideways fashion, and admitting to the woman he loves and the kid who idolizes him that he’s not someone who screws up, even in his most likable and honest moments.

And stuck between them is Duncan, a fourteen year old boy who is miserable at being dragged to the beach house of his mom’s boyfriend, challenged by multiple corners to assert himself and, in the absence of a father who “doesn't want him”, quietly trying to figure out what sort of man to be, with an unlikely Goofus and Gallant duo in front of him.

That is, undoubtedly, an oversimplification. While there are wrinkles to both Trent and Owen, in large part the movie (the directorial debut for Nat Faxon & Jim Rash) goes broad in its depiction of their faults and favor. The young women populating the town are mainly cliched mean girls; their parents are banal and oft-obnoxious yuppies, and Trent is a flat asshole with nary a redeeming quality to speak of.

Despite that, Rash and Faxon, who also wrote the film, find a strain of realness amid the large-than-life picture. Trent’s daughter, Steph, the erstwhile ringleader of the mean girls helps Duncan’s mom, Pam, with the dishes when her dad isn’t around after Pam showed genuine interest in her life, suggesting that Steph’s harsh behavior is learned and not inborn. The overly-flirty, pestersome neighbor (Allison Janney!), shows genuine affection to her daughter and for Pam. And while Trent never gets anything approaching a moment of redemption, his type of authoritarian negging and figurative flexing feels true enough to land. There’s truth beneath the cartoonishness, which helps make The Way, Way Back work.

Granted, amid its efforts to contrast two types of masculinity, one positive and one damaging, it glosses over, and even treats approvingly, casual sexual harassment. There’s a subtle thread of Duncan learning to accept his own sexuality here, with awkward treatment from his mom’s new female friends and accusations of him being a “perv,” blossoming into him chastely courting, and even kissing, his neighbor, Susanna. But it’s also a movie where Trent grabs Pam’s rear end in public while Owen teaches Duncan how to ogle and brush up against young women at the water park; and where Trent cheats on Duncan’s mom with another member of their social circle, while Owen continues to make playful but still clearly rejected passes at one of his employees. For a movie that seems so interested in comparing and contrasting, it seems strangely blasé about that sort of commonality.

Regardless, the movie does a good job of dramatizing Duncan coming out of his shell, feeling uncomfortable in his temporary home with his temporary family, and finding acceptance and encouragement at, of all places, a local water park where Owen takes him under his wing. Steve Carell’s Trent is appropriately arbitrary and domineering. Sam Rockwell’s Owen is equally and oppositely warm and rakishly charming. And the latter’s friendly encouragement almost instantly does a much better job of prompting Duncan to discover himself and “get out there” than the former’s jerkish tweaks and demands, ironically and nominally directed at the same goal.

The Way, Way Back isn’t just a story about manhood, though. It’s also a story about divorce, and the fraught task of finding your way back to equilibrium after your family is split and both sides of it start trying to forge new lives that you may or may not be on board with. That’s the subtext behind a great deal of what drives and afflicts Duncan. It’s also what makes Susanna more than just an arbitrary, trophy of a love interest (albeit not by that much). She too is a child of divorce, with the implication that part of what brings her and Duncan together is not just commiseration over the hardship of that, but her forgiving some of his awkwardness because she understands what he’s going through.

Beyond that, it’s also what drives Duncan’s mom, Pam, someone whom Duncan both loves and wants good things for, but also resents for forcing him into his thing that makes him unhappy and failing to see why Trent is such a prick. The Way, Way Back has empathy for Pam, particularly in the scene where she talks about adults needing to protect themselves. There’s a whole other version of this movie that’s just from her perspective, struggling after a broken marriage to try to balance her own happiness with raising a child and the insecurity that inevitably comes with that type of major life event. Her joining Duncan in the titular backseat area at the end of the film is a triumphant moment for Pam’s relationship with her son, but also for Pam individually, asserting herself and in the way Duncan learned to do over the course of the film.

For all that familial, coming-of-age drama, The Way, Way Back manages to be extraordinarily funny as a summer sun flick. The well-observed takes on the figurative fauna of beachside towns, the water park pranks, and a murderer’s row of fantastic comic actors (who can also get serious when they need to) makes this movie as amusing as it is interesting in its blended family psychology. The lightness of the piece makes the weighty ideas at play easier to accept and internalize and sands down some of the movie’s rougher edges.

In the end, though, it casts the stark difference between Trent and Owen that shows why one is worth appreciating and the other is worth ditching. When Pam calls out her boyfriend, he lies; he deflects, and he makes empty promises with only recidivism at the slightest bump in the road behind them. When Owen’s crush, Caitlin, calls him out for far lesser offenses, he makes a genuine effort; he apologizes in his way, and he shows a form of acceptance and self-awareness that doesn't necessarily make him deserving of Caitlin’s affections, but which brings him a hell of a lot closer to that state.
It’s no shock which version of masculinity Duncan adopts in the end. But The Way, Way Back earns his slow-spun transformation, from moody, sullen teen to a more assertive, self-actualized young adult. That transformation is made possible through a warmer, funnier, more decent type of being a man, that ultimately proves stronger and more forceful than all the feigned, faltering machismo of the rightly-discarded alternative.