SnapJolt

"The Way, Way Back" is about The Summer that Changed Everything. While vacationing at a beach house with his divorced mother, Pam (Toni Collette), her quietly domineering new boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell) and Trent's rhymes-with-witchy teenage daughter Steph (Zoe Levin), Duncan musters the courage to stand up for himself and his rather meek mom. He gets his first real job at a water park run by a talkative, funny, lovable flake named Owen (Sam Rockwell). He learns to have a semi-comfortable conversation with a lovely neighbor girl (AnnaSophia Robb of "The Carrie Diaries"). He even dances, stiffly, and learns to be cool, if "cool" is a synonym for "not obviously miserable."

As you may have guessed, all the triumphs in this film are relative to Duncan's starting place. That's what makes "The Way, Way Back" feel somewhat special, even though you've seen its component parts before, and the parts don't always fit together naturally.

There's humiliation on the home front. Trent isn't an ogre, but he's far from Prince Charming. Oedipal conflicts aside, our hero has legitimate reasons to hate him. The film's skillful opening sequence sets the tone for their relationship: as the women slumber in the car en route to Trent's summer home, he demands that Duncan rate himself on a one-to-ten scale. Trent is represented solely through shots of his eyes reflected in the car's rearview mirror. This technique puts us in the hero's shoes, and visually as well as verbally establishes that this movie is about getting over the obsession with how others see you, and deciding to see yourself more charitably. It's no coincidence that Robb's character, Susannah — the daughter of Trent's summer neighbor, the boozy, pushy divorcee Betty (Allison Janney) — warms to Duncan in direct proportion to how much Duncan warms to himself.

And then there's the early '80s comedy portion of "The Way, Way Back," which is successful, too, if more problematic. Duncan and Owen's awkward teen/man-boy mentor shtick evokes 1979's "Meatballs," which I'll bet the filmmakers can quote from memory. The Murray-esque Owen is thirty-something, but acts like a goodhearted teenage nice-guy jock who stumbled into a position of influence. The movie asks us to find it adorable when Owen and one of his employees (Faxon, who's an actor as well as a screenwriter) teach the hero how to ogle girls waiting to go down the water slide, without the girls knowing that they're being ogled. (The film portrays teenaged girls with far less sympathy than teenaged boys, Robb's girl-next-door notwithstanding.) We're also encouraged to side with Owen against the park's assistant manager Caityln (Maya Rudolph), who's constantly on Owen's back to get to work on time, observe safety regulations, and otherwise be a lame-o boring killjoy square; of course she's his sometime girlfriend, and of course she can't help loving him. At first "The Way, Way Back" pleads too hard for us to recognize Owen's specialness. He's the kind of guy you'd fantasize kicking in the slats if you actually had to work for him. To its credit, though, the film ultimately recognizes Owen for what he is: a sweeter, less competitive version of Trent.

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