![]() For the most part, when a film looks at the child and the domestic scene, the tendency is toward recuperation, even if the family is tattered ( The Ice Storm, 1995), or making the child outright crazy, lost in his/her fantasy world ( Donnie Darko, 2001) which dilutes all political/social context. The blame might be placed on institutions such as our failed educational system, or a specific unloving family. They are too often “troubled children” with “issues” to be treated (medicated) by modern psychiatry. ![]() The film asks a key question uncommon to films about adolescents in crisis. He is in a tortured quandary, the film’s ending implying only a very tentative moment of liberation, with Duncan still entirely dependent on the adult world that torments him. Young Duncan (Liam James) does nothing like that. Reviewers have also called this a “coming-of-age” film, even a bildungsroman the latter term is especially inappropriate, since the form, in its standard manifestation at least, shows a young man (it is almost always a male because of this genre’s basic ambition) awakening to experience, but in such a way that he imbibes the standing ideology. The issue is to ask what a work does with formula, how it regards the formula’s assumptions. The point, of course, is that all art contains formula, certainly genre art. Some have said the film is “formulaic.” I too, in my lazier moments, use this term to describe a film to friends. The Way,Way Back is a family melodrama, a study of family life whose occasional comedy has a bittersweet aspect that underscores its main problem, the comedy occasionally a relief, but mainly a reminder that humor is rarely a consolation. ![]() Current dramedies are films without conviction, neither fish nor fowl. ![]() The term “dramedy” always comes up – I have to conclude that few if any people know that comedy very often finds a place in drama. The film received the usual cursory reviews (although Christopher Orr gave a thoughtful comment in The Atlantic, and a couple of reviewers actually felt it to be the best film of 2013). I don’t mind stretching things to say that the film is associated in my mind with A Day in the Country (1936), for its sense of fleeting joy and human grace (the Water Wizz park crasser, of course, than Renoir’s world), and the frustrated yearning to recover same. It is a small film, yet ambitious, serious in its insights, and uncommon in its understanding of and sympathy for young people, its gentle portrayal of a small utopia affecting, as is its genuine love of humanity. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the DVD. ![]()
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