Screenings

The Way, Way Back
The Way, Way Back opens with a black screen. Through the darkness we hear Trent (Steve Carrell) posing a question: “How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10?” Trent is driving an immense Buick station wagon—one of those where the rear seat faces backwards. The three other people in the car are asleep. Trent’s new girlfriend Pam (Toni Collette) is in the front passenger seat, his 16-year-old daughter Sofia (Zoe Levin) is stretched out asleep on the middle bench seat, and way, way in the back seat is Duncan (Liam James), Pam’s 14-year-old boy. Forced to sleepily reply to the question, Duncan answers: “I dunno. A 6, I guess.”
Trent responds in an authoritarian tone, “You’re only a 3 in my book,” and we instantly see the conflict between the two males in the car.
The station wagon is headed to Trent’s Massachusetts beach house. This trim and sturdy home comes complete with familiar neighbors including Betty (Alison Janney), her sullen 16-year-old daughter Susanna (Annasophia Robb), and a lazy-eyed younger son Peter (River Alexander). With a highball sloshing in her hand, Betty becomes the town crier—reporting who is already here for the summer, and which couple Trent and Pam should avoid like the plague: “You can make up your own minds of course, but I’m just saying…”
Trent directs Duncan to bring the stuff in from the car and quickly sends the teens down to the water so the adults can have a little “alone time.”
Writer/directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash cleverly present the entire film from Duncan’s point-of-view. This means we only know what the 14-year-old knows. Some events, such as what goes on between Sofia and her self-obsessed boyfriend, are only hinted at. Others are played out Agatha Christie-style through overheard conversations observed from the stairwell or the corner of the house on a dark night.
With the black or white certainty that comes with adolescence, Duncan is sure that Trent is wrong for his mother (and for him). It is much more than just Trent’s command: “In this house we take our own plates to the kitchen, young man.” It is the piles of plates and empty beer bottles the partying adults leave behind in the morning.
Susanna observes that the goings-on are “like Spring Break for adults,” and Duncan handles the stress by pulling Sofia’s old pink bike out of the garage and exploring the town. Nonplussed by riding a girl’s bike with shiny streamers attached to the handle bars, Duncan soon discovers the Water Wizz water park where he is befriended by a laid-back dude named Owen (Sam Rockwell) and Owen’s much more responsible co-manager Caitlyn (Maya Rudolph).
Offered a job as summertime staff, “To clean up vomit and other assorted tasks as may be needed,” Duncan jumps at the opportunity. Water Wizz becomes Duncan’s coming-of-age place. The magical spot he keeps secret from his family and neighbors—the wonderland where he can be treated like a responsible human being.
Trent is torn about Duncan’s daily absences. “You worry your mother,” he reasonably argues, but he is not so secretly delighted to have Pam alone to himself. At the same time, Susanna is curious where Duncan disappears each day, so she follows him to the water park, and returns later, bikini-clad, to reveal she knows his secret, “but it’s safe with me.”
Faxon and Rash have placed this summer in a timeless locale where iPhones and shiny-new Buick station wagons co-exist. A time where Pac-Man games are still in the corner store but one character can proudly declare he was raised by two fathers. The Way, Way Back is, in short, a memory of places that once were and still are.
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