Too good-natured to hate but too generically constructed to love, The Way, Way Back labors under the delusion that all filmmakers need to engineer a crowd-pleaser are a collection of tried-and-true conventions and a healthy dose of nostalgia. Said filmmakers are Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, co-screenwriters with director Alexander Payne of the grossly overrated The Descendants, here playing affectionate but somewhat lazy homage to the fun-and-sun teen comedies of the 1980s. There’s a nugget of truth buried in this onslaught of coming-of-age clichés, and it’s that being a kid—especially a quiet one, teetering on the edge of teendom and caught between the homes of divorced parents—is often a gauntlet of humiliation. The film begins with its most cutting scene: En route to his summer vacation house, Steve Carell metes out wounding putdowns disguised as life lessons to prospective stepson Liam James, while the boy’s mother (a wonderful Toni Collette) slumbers in the passenger seat. It’s a brutally funny exchange—Carell declares that on a one-to-10 scale, James is a three—and the first of a few glancing moments that depict early adolescence as a kind of purgatory. (Too old to enjoy the freedoms of childhood and too young to earn the freedoms of adulthood, the kid is tragically trapped in that awkward middle stage.)
