Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.
I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
Jonathan Levine’s second feature (his first as both writer and director), The Wackness is a semi-autobiographical period piece set in the summer of 1994. Luke Shapiro––a white, middle-class, graduating high school loner turned self-styled weed vendor with slang, costume and taste in mix tapes loosely adapted from the machine-gun toting black guys who supply him with product––serves smoke to the shrink stepdad of his long-time crush (played by Juno sidekick Olivia Thirlby, here slinging a different brand of hyper-silly slang) in exchange for psychiatric sessions. Though Luke longs for the easy out of psychotropic drugs (his plea: “Nah! I’m mad depressed, yo!”), Dr. Squires (a turned-up-to-11 Ben Kingsley; every note of this performance is a “**** it!” shrug-off of the restraints of taste) refuses to prescribe them. Instead, the good doctor insists that what both patient and doctor really need is to get laid.
So begins a friendship oblivious to the 40-something year age difference between the two voting-age boys, but nonetheless susceptible to all of the textbook Unlikely Friendship cliches in the Indiewood universe. But if Levine shows little insight in his sketch of the way these boys play together, at least he show some inspired (if improbably reductive) paranoia in drawing the landscape on which they play. New York circa 1994 is depicted as a fading Babylon, each resident squirming in the summer heat and struggling to break free from the recently-installed Mayor Giuliani’s apparently omnipotent social control. America’s Mayor, though never seen, is referenced as a scourge more than once by nearly everyone encountered on Luke’s travails. When Luke and Squires’ big boys night out in search of ass ends in a jail cell, the message is hammered home: Giuliani’s mad emasculating, yo!
Though there’s something to be said for “ejaculation=social defiance” as a driving metaphor, The Wackness soon mellows into a story of first love, and it loses all credibility in the process. It’s never clear why we’re supposed to take Luke seriously as a protagonist or sympathize with his plight (which amounts to losing his virginity for realsies, and, far less convincingly, to saving his family home by upping his pot proceeds), but as long as the option is open to laugh at him, The Wackness has a certain goofy charm. But Levine asks us to make a whiplash-inducing transition to emotional investment in the film’s final 45 minutes, and the film suffers for this dive for depth. Boys just want to have fun? Sure, fine, whatever––there are worse ways for the kids to spend their summer afternoons than on a Giuliani-mocking stoner comedy set to De La Soul and early Biggie. But to ask us to take the cartoon character at the center of this farce as a legitimate tragic hero is to insult the audience. Or maybe I just couldn’t roll with it because I’m a girl, yo.
Will kids go see it? MOnths ago, I assumed it was a sure thing, but maybe all those blog boys were right to worry. I haven’t seen the kind of blanket advertising that might be necessary to convince the kids that The Wackness is Juno for boys, both an education in recent popular culture history and a handbook to timeless touchstones of adolescence (ie: speaking in racially slippery slang and trying to get girls drunk enough that they’re willing to **** you in public). But there’s still a chance the film will be well served by the community of (young, male) web critics cheering it on. And can you really begrudge their enthusiasm? The Wackness is an un-critical celebration of out-of-control adolescent male id, of being a walking hard-on who is never wrong. Just like their websites.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth