Old Yorker

  • The Way Way Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (2013)

    Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, with Alexander Payne, won an undeserved Oscar for writing The Descendants.  Now Faxon and Rash, independently of Payne, have written and made together The Way Way Back, their first feature as co-directors.  The title may refer, as Jonathan Kiefer suggests, to the protagonist Duncan’s place at the rear of a vast Buick en route to a small seaside town in Cape Cod.  The Buick is being driven by Trent, the new boyfriend of fourteen-year-old Duncan’s mother Pam.  (Trent is a car salesman and therefore unlikely to be a good guy.)  Taciturn, awkward, miserable Duncan, who would rather be spending the summer with his father, sits as far away as possible from the other three people in the car – the third of them is Trent’s daughter Steph – but he’s not out of range of Trent’s needling questions.  (‘How do you rate yourself – on a scale of 1 to 10?’  Duncan eventually comes up with a six.  ‘I think you’re a three’, decides Trent.)

    I wonder if the title also acknowledges the movie’s mixed-up nostalgic aspects.   I read online that Faxon and Rash originally intended their story to be set in the 1980s and they’ve not entirely abandoned that idea.  Duncan finds refuge from the brew of discomfort and tension in and around Trent’s beach house at a local water park, Water Wizz.  He’s told by the manager Owen, who takes a liking to Duncan, that Water Wizz is three decades old and deliberately unchanged from the way it was designed by the man who started it.   One of Owen’s staff is the droll, fey Lewis – the joke about him is that he’s always threatening to leave Water Wizz but never does.  Jim Rash, who was just about Duncan’s age thirty years ago, plays Lewis.   Nat Faxon, who’s five years younger, plays another assistant, Roddy, an unashamed big kid.   The surprising rarity of iPhones, especially among the adolescents, also suggests that Faxon and Rash haven’t thoroughly updated their screenplay.  The Way Way Back is old-fashioned in another sense too:  the kids’ miseries are all the fault of the grown-ups, who seem to have only themselves to blame for their own failures and unhappiness.

    The story is summer-I-grew-up formulaic and it’s inevitable that Duncan will learn how to live life not from Trent – a treacherous lech as well as a pompous bully and control freak – but from his polar opposite Owen, an essentially honourable scamp with dry wit to burn.    Faxon and Rash have some very talented people on board – Steve Carell as the vile Trent, Toni Collette as the confused, borderline feckless Pam, Allison Janney as Betty, a hysterically jolly dipso from the beach house next door.  All three give their characters more depth and variety than the smartly written dialogue and the facile plotting deserve.  I can’t get enthusiastic about Sam Rockwell but, as Owen, he certainly delivers what the directors want.  The underused Maya Rudolph is excellent as Owen’s girlfriend Caitlyn – warm, exasperated and the only Water Wizz employee with an emotional age in advance of the place’s teenage clientele.   Liam James as Duncan is sympathetic not least because he’s been asked to shoulder rather too much.  James’ physical tension, and moments of release from it, are good.   Zoe Levin is Steph;  the other youngsters are Betty’s kids Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), with whom Duncan teeters on the brink of a relationship, and Peter (River Alexander), whose lazy eye is the subject of at least two jokes too many.   The cast also includes Amanda Peet and Rob Cordrry.    The Way Way Back is termed a comedy-drama.  Nnot unusually, it simply alternates the two elements most of the time.  I thought perhaps its best sequence was when they were combined, in an excruciating board game, which Trent, Pam, Duncan and Steph play while confined to barracks by heavy rain.   The film didn’t make me laugh often but it’s no doubt doing well commercially because it has a more positive effect on many other people.   It also seems to be getting reviews rather better than it deserves but The Way Way Back is unlikely to be overrated in the same award-winning way as The Descendants.  Partly because of this, I preferred it to Alexander Payne’s movie.

    30 August 2013

  • The Hypnotist

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hypnotisören

    Lasse Hallström (2012)

    Saturday evening, BBC 4, 9pm:  the now time-honoured hour of Scandi-noir.  The Hypnotist was screened in this slot last night.  The plot had plenty of improbabilities and loose ends but the main question in this viewer’s mind the morning after is why this became a cinema feature rather than just another television crime drama.  Perhaps only because the source material – a 2009 novel by Lars Kepler (the pen name of the husband-and-wife team of Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril) – was such a bestseller?   It’s hard to see from this reasonably entertaining but very ordinary movie what else could explain its different screen status.  The Hypnotist contains lots of bloodshed but so do some of the television Scandi-noirs; unlike them, Lasse Hallström’s film has no scenes-of-a-sexual-nature.   Hallström himself is, of course, a well-known name in international cinema but his star has continued to fall in recent years.  His direction here isn’t obviously more imaginative than that of his TV Scandi-noir counterparts.

    The two main men in The Hypnotist are the police detective Joona Linna (the resident protagonist of the Lars Kepler books) and the titular character, Erik Maria Bark, a controversial psychologist who is brought in to interview the sole survivor of knife attacks on members of a single family.  This survivor, a teenage boy called Josef, is himself seriously injured and comatose:  Erik’s hypnotist skills enable him to reach states of (un)consciousness that other interrogators can’t reach.  In Paolo Vacirca’s screenplay, these skills are, as you’d expect, deployed to bring about key movements in the story and forgotten about in the meantime, when conventional policing methods are more convenient to maintaining mystery and suspense.

    It turns out that Josef is the killer of his adoptive family – father, mother and younger sister.  (An older sister, who’s been taken into care, has a lucky escape.)  Josef (Jonatan Bökman) is acting on the instructions of his biological mother Lydia (Anna Azcárate).  She, for good measure, abducts Benjamin (Oscar Pettersson), the young haemophiliac son of Erik (Mikael Persbrandt) and his artist wife Simone (Lena Olin).  It’s important that Simone is an artist:  once Erik has hypnotised her so that she can recall the abduction episode, Simone is able to draw a 100% lifelike portrait of the woman who injected her with a soporific drug before heading in the direction of Benjamin’s bedroom.   There’s a serious disconnect between Lydia’s motivation and the garishly gory murders she gets Josef to commit – or, at least, a serious lack of explanation of the latter’s psychology:  is he meant to be a homicidal maniac or just an appallingly obedient son?  There’s no explanation of plenty of other things in The Hypnotist:  how Lydia – sectioned for ten years and recently released back into the community – got herself a nursing job in a hospital; why Benjamin so much prefers his father to his mother, and so on.   The marital problems of these two vanish once they’ve served their atmospheric purpose.

    The film is well acted and the emotional balance of the three central characters – Erik, Simone and Joona (Tobias Zilliacus) – is satisfying. Mikael Persbrandt is, as usual, a strong and persuasive presence.  Although the character’s mood swings are tiresome (actually you can see why Benjamin prefers his father), Lena Olin’s melancholy beauty keeps you interested in Simone.   Tobias Zilliacus, an actor new to me, is particularly good as Joona Linna.  The script verges on overstressing Joona’s geeky bachelordom but Zilliacus’s combination of ordinariness and wry charm is effective.  Without being dramatically workaholic, he convinces you how much Joona’s job matters to him.  This undemonstratively dogged detective is a welcome contrast to the flashier, bloodier elements of The Hypnotist.

    2 July 2016

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