It seems odd to wax nostalgic about
the year 1994, not just because so little time has passed between then and now,
but because the particulars of the period—the music, the fashions, the
language, the politics—are so hazy and elusive. If nothing else, Jonathan
Levine's coming-of-age film The Wackness evokes the summer of '94 with impressive
particularity; it's one thing to get the look and sound of the time right, but
Levine also captures the atmosphere of fear and loathing in Rudy Giuliani's New
York, where the task of "cleaning up" the city swept too much under the rug. With
such a rich backdrop in place, it's a shame that Levine brings so little of
interest to the fore—instead, he centers on a mopey teenage drug pusher
whose mind seems perpetually clouded in pot smoke. He's a bore, and the movie
bores along with him.
In the summer following his
high-school graduation, Upper East Side screw-up Josh Peck makes a few bucks
selling grass out of a beat-up pushcart advertising "f esh & del cious
ices." (It's the middle of summer, yet no one ever asks him for these flavored
treats, which speaks to the transparency of his operation.) While in school,
Peck was what he describes as "the most popular of the unpopular," and he tends
to tread lightly and leave little impression, which may explain why he has few
friends and is technically still a virgin. Bummed by his situation, Peck seeks
counsel from nutty psychiatrist Ben Kingsley, who accepts him as a client in
exchange for weed, and becomes his closest confidant. Peck also develops a
friendship with Kingsley's step-daughter Olivia Thirlby (Juno), whose hippie-dippie
free-spiritedness brings him out of his shell.
The Wackness' main draw is Kingsley's giddily
over-the-top performance as a pothead, and the film delights in showing Gandhi
sparking a huge bong or making out with Mary-Kate Olsen in a phone booth. Yet
it's paced much more to Peck's brooding wavelength, and like a lot of movies
with passive protagonists, it inevitably goes slack. Only in one lovely
sequence, when Peck and Thirlby escape for a romantic weekend on Fire Island,
does the film come alive, in part because its hero finally sees past his own
navel. Most of the time, Peck is cast adrift in an uncertain world, and Levine
too often conflates his lack of purpose with the movie's.