Cinema: The Wackness

Hugh Evans

28/08/08

What happens when teenage angst and a mid-life crisis meet?

I think I must be getting old. Surely they can’t be making films set in 1994 and expect us to think how much the world has changed since then? But while watching The Wackness you start to concede that perhaps it has.

For example, do you remember when the cool kids had pagers, not mobile phones, when Tupac and Biggie were alive, and when the news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide was still on everyone’s lips? Yep, well into the ‘noughties’ now, this dark ‘coming of age’ comedy allows you to look back at the nineties with a nostalgic grin at how things used to be.

The story begins with the introduction of troubled school nerd turned drug dealer, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck). Merely being ‘the coolest of the unpopular kids’ he finds a friend in crackpot psychiatrist, Dr Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), who exchanges professional advice for his weekly dosage of hash.

The pair become closer as they realise they are both yearning for the same thing – they just want to get laid. For Dr Squires, whose marriage is ropey, it is blowing off some steam (you can’t help but cringe though watching a 65 year-old Sir Ben getting raunchy in a phone booth with a dreadlocked 22 year-old Mary-Kate Olsen). For Shapiro, however, who secretly is gunning for Squires’s daughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the mission is a little more complicated.

Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, who himself graduated high school in 1994, the film is lovingly littered with phrases that could be taken straight out of a mid-‘90s episode of the Ricki Lake Show. You get to reminisce about when people greeted each other as ‘dawg’, said cool things were ‘dope’, and when bad things were just ‘wack’.

The soundtrack is like no other, bringing together a wild selection of artists from DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, to A Tribe Called Quest, R Kelly, and the Wu-Tang Clan. I’m already itching to get to the shops to buy the soundtrack album on cassette tape.

I hope I have not deceived you with my fond reflections into thinking that this film is just a happy glance back at the past. The main male characters are regularly repressed and shunned by the more dominant women in their lives. Unrequited love is rife, and you are given a bleak insight into the world of two lonely men at different stages of their depression. Perhaps the nineties was not all fresh and fly for Mr Levine.

The Wackness has enough of a storyline and some strong individual performances (Sir Ben steals the show as you would expect) to keep most audiences entertained. I think, however, it will really only be appreciated by those who lived through the decade and can remember what it was like. Word.