THE WACKNESS

Just one week ago, I was talking with my parents who had just returned from a trip to New York City. We talked about Times Square and how it was always an endless field of tourists. We shook our heads at how the neon and billboards provided enough light to read the serial number off your iPod in the dead of night. But it struck me that it wasn’t always so. I remembered that it wasn’t all that long ago, that Manhattan underwent a hardcore overhaul in an attempt to sweep all the unsightliness that gave it character under the wrong. This period of transition is the setting for THE WACKNESS, a well-made look at who we were just fourteen years ago.

Set in the summer of 1994, THE WACKNESS is the story of Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck). Luke is the sort of kid who doesn’t have many friends, and who girls ignore…unless of course they find themselves in search of weed, which Luke spends his free time dealing. He has just graduated from high school, and is about to spend his last summer before University roaming the streets of New York dealing weed out of his ramshackle ice-ee cart. It’s actually not such a bad situation, since anytime he feels down he makes an appointment with his shrink…who he has sessions with in exchange for weed.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), is an odd choice for a moral compass. He’s stuck in a loveless marriage, and seems to be in the throes of an attempt to re-capture his youth. His advice to Luke is usually sound, but what is one to think of the doctor who fires up his bong just as his patients session is ending? Luke seems to understand not to take Squires’ advice of living for the moment and sowing his wild oats as gospel, but still finds him to be a better confidant than his own parents who are having difficulty making eds meet in their Upper East Side lifestyle.

In his comings and goings from sessions with the shrink, Luke catches the attention of Squires’ step-daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). Stephanie hasn’t really talked to him before, and seems to only be interested because all of her friends have left town for the summer. This doesn’t matter much to Luke, who’s just happy to have the attention of a girl who usually wouldn’t give him the time of day. She starts joining him as he makes his rounds, and by not trying to impress her, he manages to impress her. Her interest in him gives him a new outlook on life. He learns to focus on the dopeness of things, and not to worry so much about the wackness.

Well, as if that last sentence didn’t spell it out for you, THE WACKNESS is a cinematic snapshot of who we were just fourteen years ago. It’s a look at life before cellphones, before iPods, and before Rudy Giuliani took a power washer to downtown Manhattan. Set in a summer where Biggie Smalls was alive, and Kurt Cobain was dead, the movie is one ninety minute love letter to life in the nineties. What makes it work though, is that it stops just short of becoming a silly caricature of a bygone time. The pounding R&B music, the styles, and the language set the stage for the story…they don’t become the story themselves.

If I have a gripe with the movie, it’s the casting of Mary Kate Olsen as a hippie named Union. Imagine Penny Lane from ALMOST FAMOUS as a strung-out flake. The character is pretty useless, and yet distracting. Her performance doesn’t so much evoke a stoner as it does a ditz…in which case I wonder just how far off her performance is from the genuine article. Elsewhere, the movie does manage to push the nineties references a bit too far at times – there’s a Reebok Pump moment combined with a FORREST GUMP mention that feels amazingly forced and almost derails the whole thing.

What makes THE WACKNESS work is how is overlays Luke’s journey of figuring out who he wants to be, with the massive clean-up of New York. Luke hasn’t gotten it all figured out yet – he’s the sort that says “I love you” a bit too early to the wrong sort of girl. Does he want to be someone who is cooler, more inviting, more accessible, more generic? Or are all his moments of idiocy, darker flaws, and unseemly characteristics what make him far more interesting? Fourteen years later, there is certainly no going back on the decision for the city of New York. It leads me to wonder how Luke turned out, and who he turned into.

In a way, I’m sort of the wrong person to be writing about this movie. It’s set during my teenage years, so much of the nods and winks to 90’s culture are things I can identify with. I’d be curious to see what younger audiences think of the movie…audiences who never heard of Zima, never used a pager and don’t know who Kriss Kross were. Maybe where I see dopeness, they’d only see wackness…or whatever the heck the kids are calling wackness these days.

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★

What did you think? Please leave comments with your thoughts and reactions on THE WACKNESS.