'Wackness' a lackness of snapness
"The Wackness" - which won the Sundance Film Festival audience award for writer-director Jonathan Levine - is an arty little New York anti-romance that carries us back to the summer of 1994 in the heyday of "Forrest Gump," hip-hop lingo and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's war on crime.
Seemingly semi-autobiographical, or at least very well-researched, this audacious but ultimately dispiriting love comedy is about a dangerous three-cornered relationship among an insecure Upper East Side high school drug dealer named Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck); his pot-smoking, deeply depressed psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), who's still nostalgic for the '60s and '70s and gets paid by Luke in dime bags; and the shrink's sexy, hedonistic stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), who breaks Luke's heart.
The movie, well-acted but not quite as well-written, plunges us into the dangerous liaisons of these three hip, glib but sometimes morally unattractive lovers, navigating us through drugs, promiscuity, masturbation, sex, prostitution and near suicide - as well as somewhat less gamy problems like facing eviction and finding Donovan songs ("Season of the Witch") on a local jukebox.
Luke, or "Shapiro" as his young customers all call him, is the central character here and that's a big part of the problem.
Levine and Peck work hard to make Luke both charismatic and likably vulnerable; they're trying to create a sort of magnetic schlemiel. But it's hard to sympathize with a drug dealer who's so blasˆ½ about his daily rounds and so full of seeming admiration for his supplier Percy (Method Man), even if it's marijuana that Luke peddles out of his ice cream cart. It's harder still to believe it when Luke confesses to both a Woody Allen-style inferiority complex and a stubborn case of virginity - and hardest of all to accept him at the end as a full-hearted romantic.
Peck's lead performance also is prone to a mumbling delivery that suggests David Schwimmer crossed with Marlon Brando and a dash of Mickey Rourke. It doesn't ring well.
Thirlby is much less mannered and more spontaneous, but her character has a similar creep factor. The filmmakers try to make her devastatingly sexy by giving her casual chatter about sex, a few nude and bikini scenes and a near constant saucy grin. But she still plays less like a real, if flawed flirt, than a payback character from the filmmaker's past. (The title comes from Steph's slangy remark that, while she looks for the "doneness" in life, gloomy Luke looks for the "wackiness.")
There are interesting but obvious roles for Famke Janssen (the doc's discontent wife), Mary-Kate Olsen (amazingly, as a pseudo-hippie slut) and Jane Adams (as an aging rocker). But the performance that almost makes the movie comes, as you'd expect, from Kingsley. As he showed recently in "The Love Guru," this brilliant chameleon can triumph over any movie swamp he hurls himself into. Here, with his long frizzy hair, haunted eyes and four-letter gab, Kingsley's Squires suggests the late George Carlin, both physically and verbally. And if that doesn't seem like startling versatility, imagine Carlin as Gandhi. "The Wackness" has been shot not like a romantic comedy (bright, clear images), but more like a moody euro crime thriller with noir shadows and desaturated lighting. It does have one terrific scene: Luke, Squires and Olsen's carousing with her sleepy john in a bar. But though Levine shows gifts beyond the ordinary - as does his sometimes spectacularly good cast - what they and the movie badly need is a good high.
"The Wackness"
Rating: 2 stars
Starring: Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby
Director: Jonathan Levine
Other: A Sony Pictures Classics release. At the Century Centre and River East 21 in Chicago, the Renaissance Place in Highland Park and the Evanston CineArts 6. Rated R (drug use, language, sexual situations). 101 minutes.