"The Kings of Summer" and "The Way, Way Back"

I've soured somewhat on coming of age films over the years, having seen too many bad ones that either tried to make themselves grand statements that they were never going to be, or by dipping too often into salacious material related to mental illness, drugs, abuse, or sexual dysfunction. I've found that these films work best when they're more grounded and more personal, films that take care to limit themselves to a certain size and scope. This year there were two fairly successful examples that came out quite close together, "The Kings of Summer," and "The Way, Way Back." I suspect "The Spectacular Now" may be a third, but I missed my chance to see it in theaters, and it's still three months to the home media releases. And I want to talk about the other two now.

"The Kings of Summer" follows two teenage boys, Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso), who are both chafing at the restrictions that their parents have placed on their lives. Joe's recently widowed father, Frank (Nick Offerman), is overly critical and unsympathetic, trying to move on with a new romantic relationship that Joe isn't ready for. Patrick's parents (Megan Mullally, Marc Evan Jackson) are cloying and overprotective. One day, Joe finally has enough and convinces Patrick to run away together. They construct their own ramshackle house out of spare parts in the woods , with the help of an oddball kid named Biaggio (Moisés Arias), and declare that they're ready to live by their own rules. However, the newfound freedom and the complications of teenage love prove challenging for the boys to navigate.

This is by far the best performance I've seen out of Nick Offerman, better known for his work on "Parks & Rec." He plays Frank as a reflexively sarcastic, bitter jerk who has to face the fact that his prickly personality is doing real harm to his relationship with his son. Watching him work through his baggage and reconnect with Joe is the best part of the film. Nick Robinson is likewise playing a very imperfect kid, smart but too cocky for his own good, and manages to make him far more memorable than the similar teenage boys that are always at the center of these stories. Between the two of them, a movie that is built on a big heap of contrivances actually works to a surprising degree. Joe's relationships with his father and his friends feel genuine, and the way they develop and change over the course of the film likewise feel genuine.

The material is still on the slight side, and it has a sense of humor that I think it's fair to describe as a little peculiar. Biaggio and the ineffectual local cops seem to exist in a film universe closer to "Napoleon Dynamite" than the fairly realistic environs that the rest of the characters are inhabiting. Also, at times it feels like the director, newcomer Jordan Vogt-Roberts, wants to say something about nature and the appeal of a more rustic way of life, but it doesn't quite come across. However, he does a great job with the boys and their interactions, and interpersonal dynamics. I think the reason this story works is that Joe and Patrick have real, recognizable problems. They may seem common, and not very serious in the long run, but we can see how they are terribly important at this particular point in thier lives.

The same can be said for the protagonist of "The Way, Way Back," a fourteen year old boy named Duncan (Liam James), who is dragged along on a long summer trip to Cape Cod with his mother Pam (Toni Colette), her bullying boyfriend Trent (Steve Carrell), and his hostile daughter Steph (Zoe Levin). Duncan is emotionally withdrawn and miserable until he meets a local girl, Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), and has a run-in with a free-spirited guy named Owen (Sam Rockwell), who turns out to be the manager of a local water park. Owen gives him a job, which affords Duncan a much-needed escape from his increasingly uncomfortable home life.

"The Way, Way Back" was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who shared scripting duties with Alexander Payne on "The Descendants." Here they prove to be equally as good with a new set of more familiar, but still complicated emotional dynamics, and tackling lot of uncomfortable subject matter without banging the audience over the head with it. By the time we realize just how miserable all the kids are, not just Owen, we've gotten a pretty good picture of how this little vacationers' community operates. Steve Carrell and Toni Colette are especially good as two characters who could have so easily been cyphers from the teenage hero's point of view.

Still, I can't help wishing that the whole film had been about the crew at the water park. Sam Rockwell steals the film so completely, you feel like sitting up straighter every time he shows up on screen. He gets all the best lines, delivered with the kind of unselfconscious cool that not too many actors can pull off. Maya Rudolph, along with Faxon and Rash, play other water park employees, and there's the potential for so much more than we get to see of them. The ending feels very rushed and some of the climactic scenes feel unearned, and I think it's largely because we don't get to spend enough time seeing Joe really connect with this weird little community of water park denizens.

Still, I liked both films. They're warm and nostalgic and bittersweet and offer a glimpse of adolescence the way I remember it. And they tell stories that only work with teenagers as the heroes, which I wish more filmmakers would keep in mind when making these films.
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