This Is Your Ben. This Is Your Ben On Drugs | Sir Ben Kingsley hits the bong (and hits on Mary-Kate Olsen) in The Wackness.
THE WACKNESS
Directed by Jonathan Levine. Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Mary-Kate Olsen, Method Man. Opens Fri, Aug 1.
***1/2
It’s hard to talk about The Wackness without coming off as entirely negative, so let me preface everything I’m about to say by noting that this film really is worth watching. It’s heartfelt, earnest, and entertaining. It made me laugh a couple of times too. That said, it’s not without issues.
The story takes place in 1994 New York, where recent high school graduate Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), a pot-smoking outsider B-boy, is frustrated with his life. His parents are always fighting, he has no friends, and if he doesn’t get laid soon, he may be the only virgin left in NYC. He admits all this to his shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), an aging man who clings to his youth by trading psychiatric therapy for grams of weed. His advice to Luke is to feel the pain of life and to embrace it rather than run away from it. (Although Luke would much rather feel and embrace Dr. Squires’ cute stepdaughter, played by Juno’s Olivia Thirlby.) Anyhow, Squires and Luke stumble through the swelteringly hot summer embracing the pain of their lives, finding new ways to work through it, and, eventually, get over it.
Sound familiar? You bet. Forgettable? Not really—just a little predictable, its plot points a little telegraphed. The Wackness is practically a coming-of-age story mixtape: if you combined The Graduate with Good Will Hunting and added a thick cloud of weed smoke, you’d have a rough outline of what writer/director Jonathan Levine is up to here. Luke may be a stoner, but he’s not stupid—it’s established early on that when summer ends he’ll be going to his safety college. He’s doesn’t fit the usual drug-dealer stereotype either—he sells weed out of an Italian Ices cart in order to save money for his family.
The Wackness is also unusual in that it may be the first pot comedy to indulge in nostalgia for the ’90s instead of the ’70s. Levine tries to make a case for 1994 as a sort of end-of-the-innocence turning-point year for youth culture: then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani is cracking down on drugs and crime, hip-hop is making inroads with white teenagers, while Kurt Cobain’s death has deprived them of their generation’s unofficial spokesman. But his handling of these cultural signifiers feels shallow and arbitrary. Kurt Cobain, for instance, is mentioned twice in this film: once in a moment of comic relief as a possible reason for Luke’s depression, and once as the subject of a giant mural that Luke and Dr. Squires pass by near the end of the film.
Also, for a B-boy, Luke’s taste in rap is pretty shallow. The soundtrack (which boils down to a few tracks from Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, a few Method Man singles, and one Nas song) is more like a white suburbanite’s “oldies” playlist than the wide range of music true hip-hop heads were listening to during the genre’s heyday.
All that said, the core relationship between Luke and Dr. Squires, two guys at different points in their lives looking to flee their conventional surroundings, is both hilarious and poignant. Kingsley, who seems more and more determined to undermine his serene Gandhi image with each passing year, is terrific, but Peck is even better, switching with surprising control between smart-but-lazy stoner and vulnerable romantic, and the two have an incredible chemistry together.
The Wackness is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of film—nobody is going to have a neutral reaction to the sight of Ben Kingsley making out with Mary-Kate Olsen. Yes, the story is clichéd, but Levine’s telling of it is entertaining and even touching—and after all, as Nas himself once said, “No idea’s original.”
