Catching up on last summer’s (surprising plethora of) teen movies has offered an incredible variety of teen experiences. Coming of age can mean so many different things, from sexual awakening, to growing up, moving on, coming to terms with one’s reality, or in the case of The Way Way Back, finding that one person to care about and inspire you.
It was so nice in this film to see the solitude of adolescence. It is rare for teens in popular fiction not to have at least one close friend and confidante. Even outcasts usually travel in packs, with fellow geeks as support. But The Way Way Back‘s Duncan is alone. The isolation he feels is palpable as he and his mother accompany her boyfriend to his beach house, a summer vacation where Duncan is automatically an outcast, a new kid in a strange beach-side town with summer traditions that don’t include him. He is one kid against the excruciating reality of his mother’s horrible boyfriend, the strange community of beach-house regulars, the exclusion of the boyfriend’s more popular daughter.
It’s a painful isolation, but it is beautiful, and speaks volumes about the adolescent experience, that enforced solitude that fills 14-year-old Duncan up, inside and out.
This film walks this painful line of tragic solitude, until Duncan meets an adult who is kind and cares, who gives him a job, and becomes his friend. His one friend, his ally against the painful realities of home. Or the beach house, which can never really feel like home.
And in this connection, The Way Way Back becomes the story of making that one friend, escaping to a secret life kept strategically apart from the life of painful isolation. It’s a story about how important it is to a teen to have that one person who seems to care more about you than themselves. One person against a whole world of weird, annoying, frustrating people, can make all the difference.
In this story, that person is an adult. It’s a subtle thing, for an adult ally to take on the role of friend, beyond mentor and wise elder. It’s a subtle difference for this subtle film, to recognize that friendships can extend across these boundaries of age. This film doesn’t patronize youth with the assertion that teens need adult guidance, but it does offer it as a steadfast advocate, an ally against the self-obsessed selfishness of the adult world.
The Way Way Back is a sad, soulful kind of film. But it’s also sweet and occasionally funny. The cast is fantastic, and while it’s definitely not just a light-hearted summer comedy, its portrait of a summer vacation, with all the warped rules and customs that come with time away from the real world, is priceless.
