Sundance ’08: The Wackness

**/****
starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Olivia Thirlby
written and directed by Jonathan Levine

by Alex Jackson In the opening scene of The Wackness, teenager Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is having a session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). Dr. Squires tells him that a "quarter bag" will buy him forty-five minutes. Luke produces the requested pot and goes on to discuss his problems as Dr. Squires fills and lights up a bong. In one of the film's closing scenes, Luke is having dinner with his family when an uncle asks him what he wants to be once he finishes college. He responds that he's thinking he'd like to be a "shrink"–after all, he should be an expert, having been surrounded by so many fucked-up people. These two scenes go far in illustrating both the film's sickly sentimentality and its muddled perspective towards adolescence. Not to get moralistic on you, but Luke is essentially being exploited by his psychiatrist: instead of trading sex for a sympathetic ear, he's trading drugs. It isn't that great a leap. But rather than growing to realize that Dr. Squires is a user and a loser (the humour of seeing Sir Ben Kingsley toke up is rooted in the incongruence of such a prestigious actor behaving so immaturely, right?), he ultimately views him as a figure to emulate in a sea of unworthy adult role models. I'm not saying that The Wackness is morally bankrupt, exactly, just that its values are confused. Luke at times comes off as an omniscient demigod who sees through the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world and at other times comes off as a complete fucking idiot who overuses "mad" in its colloquial form. Dr. Squires is sometimes a wise and loving mentor and sometimes a total mess who needs Luke to rescue him. Writer-director Jonathan Levine may have intended these contradictions to inform a co-dependent relationship between them, but for the most part it merely seems like he wants it both ways. The Wackness strikes me as a very primitive film. To cover up the sentimentality of the material, Levine gives us a lot of drug use and a repetitious use of the word "fuck." Meanwhile, Petra Korner's cinematography desaturates the colours in an apparent attempt to make the film look less cute, but it ends up looking grungy in a very aesthetic way. Ben Kingsley is pretty good and appears to be enjoying himself, yet his presence in the film–like that of Mary-Kate Olsen–remains cheap stunt-casting. (To heighten the novelty factor, Levine has the two lock lips in a barroom phone booth.) Most annoying is the easy nostalgia Levine preys on by setting the film in New York circa 1994. His pretense for doing so is that this was when Mayor Rudy Giuliani began cleaning up the city, but it seems informed by a desire to show our hero playing "The Legend of Zelda" as much as anything else. It was probably only a matter of time before Generation Y got around to memorializing the good old days, I just wish it wasn't this soon.