THE WACKNESS sss Written and directed by JONATHAN LEVINE WITH JOSH PECK, BEN KINGSLEY, OLIVIA THIRLBY, FAMKE JANSSEN, JANE ADAMS, AND mETHOD mAN
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If I were Levine reading this I’d probably hang my head, because few filmmakers have been able to crystallize the doubts of a generation the way Mike Nichols did with The Graduate in 1967. Rewatching that film, I was struck by how immediate it seems even after 40 years, whereas The Wackness, set in the summer of 1994 and steeped in the hip-hop sounds of the era, is colored by Levine’s premature nostalgia. (For more on 90s nostalgia, see Miles Raymer’s column in the music section this week.) But by changing the middle-aged, alcoholic Mrs. Robinson of the Nichols movie into a man, and centering his illicit relationship with the adolescent hero on pot rather than sex, Levine manages to give the story a new spin.
Squires is a child of the 60s—probably one of those kids who identified so strongly with The Graduate—and he still seems very much like a child, prankishly dropping water balloons on pedestrians from the window of his office. If the generation gap seems to have closed between 1967 and 1994, that’s only because the adult characters have failed to grow up. At home Luke has to turn up his headphones to drown out his parents’ juvenile bickering, and both Squires and his wife, trapped in a dead marriage like the Robinsons, are darkly obsessed with the loss of their youth. When Squires counsels Luke, his advice is colored by envy. “Lucas, do you have any idea what I would give to be you again?” he says. “Get your heart broken, find yourself face down in the gutter, get your pulse up, make a real mess of your life, son!”
Ultimately that may be the movie’s Achilles’ heel: almost all the female characters are harridans, and by the end Luke and Dr. Squires have reconciled, united by their heartache. Compared to the famously ambiguous ending of The Graduate, when Benjamin and Elaine sit at the back of a bus, newly minted adults facing an uncertain future together, the conclusion of The Wackness suffers from a kind of arrested male adolescence. In a coming-of-age movie, someone ought to come of age.v
