The Wackness faced an enormous hurdle straight out of the gate. How do you encourage an audience to identify with and even root for a main character who is an unrepentant drug dealer? Normally you take two hours to create a character arc, allowing your lead to change to such a degree that the person we meet in the beginning of the film is nearly unrecognizable to the one we know at the end. Or, if you are the filmmakers behind the grimy and unredeeming The Wackness, you create so miniscule an arc as to ostracize the majority of those watching your movie.
The time is 1994. The place is the sweltering streets of New York City. Newly minted mayor Rudolph Giuliani is cracking down on crime amidst pledges to transform the litter-strewn, graffiti-emblazoned, crime-ridden metropolis. Within this whitewashing maelstrom, young Luke (Josh Peck) is spending his last summer at home before heading off to college. But Luke is not your average 18-year-old. He’s a drug dealer who peddles dope out of a pushcart. Luke, whose home life is anything but stable, prefers life on the street to dealing with his parents’ ever-escalating war of words and the omnipresent threat of eviction. Socially inept and colossally insecure around girls, Luke is invisible to everyone except those looking to get high.
Luke’s only friend is his therapist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley). Squires, who has Luke pay for his sessions with pot, is far more screwed up than his clients. Full of unconventional, even downright depraved advice, the drug-addled shrink is dependent on the very prescriptions he dolls out. In the midst of losing his much-younger wife (Famke Janssen), Squires determines that what he and Luke need is to get laid. Luke has a colossal crush on Squires’ way-out-of-his league stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), and is shocked when she returns his affections. Although Luke’s relationship with Stephanie provides him with a difficult, if necessary, life-lesson, he learns the true meaning of friendship through his unlikely role model, Squires.
Powered by a pulsating hip-hop score featuring Tupac and Biggie and shot through a perpetual haze of marijuana smoke, The Wackness is the sort of movie you walk out of with a contact high. The film does a fantastic job making contemporary Manhattan — cleaner than it has ever been — look grimy and soiled. Perhaps too good. I left the screening feeling as if I desperately needed a shower. The plot didn’t help. The Wackness would like to believe it is the story of two lost souls fumbling toward maturity. However, the characters are so unchanged by the end of the film that it has the effect of making them appear stupid and determined to simply continue in their self-destructive ways.
The great Sir Ben Kingsley has been choosing some atrocious roles lately. This is not one of them. Kingsley is the only good thing about this morally apathetic film. His Squires is in the depths of despair one moment and tapped into a live wire the next, careening out of control in an embarrassing attempt to rediscover “simple” youth in the very vices that savaged his adulthood. Kingsley brings Squires to the edge of parody but takes a step back just in time to avoid tumbling over the edge. Peck does a nice job, as does Thirlby, who, best known as the sidekick in Juno, is beginning to gobble up screen time in every other film hitting theaters this year. In the most bizarre bit of casting, watch for Mary-Kate Olsen as a stoned hippie-pixie.
The Wackness is a moderately funny variant of the traditional coming-of-age saga. But it tries too hard to be sentimental and never creates characters likeable enough to care for.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.