The Wackness: A Quick Review

I'm really lukewarm on "The Wackness", but that's more of an averaged-out reaction than an overall reaction. Parts of it were spot-on excellent, depicting a menagerie of locations and characters that perfectly capture a time and place. But much of it was mired down in the kind of narcissism that doomed "The Ice Storm" and kept me from really connecting with anything in the movie for more than a few scenes at a time. Fire and Ice make lukewarm water, right?

The movie follows Josh, a teen pot dealer, and his friendship with his addict shrink (Ben Kingsley) throughout the summer of 1994. (Is 15 years ago too soon to have a period piece? And did I really graduate from high school 15 years ago?) Josh mostly spends the summer trying to have a relationship with his shrink's step-daughter, and failing in one way or another, while Ben Kingsley slowly tries to flush his life down the toilet. They're an interesting pair, sort of a Harold and Maude for the 90s. Josh takes Sir Ben on a tour of his world, and "hilarity" ensure.

It gets a little tiresome to watch people just be petty and irresponsible for an hour and a half. It's one thing to watch on a Trainspotting kind of scale... here, it just came across as a little boring. I had trouble caring about them. Josh is an interesting character in spots... he's a naive, innocent drug dealer, and a lonely kid yearning for connection. As the shrink, Ben Kingsley is alternately entertaining and alienating, but mostly sad.

I can't quite recommend this flick. It's got something to offer for the right audience... if you suspect you might be in that audience, check it out. Otherwise, I think there are a lot of other movies that offer better versions of the same aspects the movie tries to capture, ranging from "Do the Right Thing" to "Harold & Maude" to "Friday" (if you're looking for the drug comedy this was marketed as).

As a bit of a post-script, this is the third or fourth movie in last few months that I've come into with completely misguided expectations thanks to misleading movie marketing and/or poor Netflix descriptions. The Wackness was described as an indie comedy, and is about anything but. The extent of the comedy is pretty much "Look, Ben Kingsley has a bong!", or maybe the larger "all of life is a joke" style of comedy. This was a comedy in the same way "The Catcher in the Rye" is a comedy. I understand that movie marketers need to do their best to sell a movie, but I've been feeling really misled lately in relying on genre descriptions. Shape up, marketers!