dvd of the week
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payner for The Descendants, and the The Way, Way Back is the first feature written and directed only by them. A coming-of-age comedy set in a summer beach town and its local water park, it is one of the best movies of the year: funny, moving, a crowd-pleasing anecdote to the bombastic action films that dominated the theaters this summer. Duncan (Liam James) is a quiet, depressive 14-year-old boy who is spending the summer at his mother’s boyfriend’s beach house. He doesn’t want to be there, partly because he misses his father, but mostly because his mother (Toni Collette) has hitched herself to a snide creep (Steve Carell), whose daughter Steph (Zoe Levin) is almost as unpleasant as he is. He finds an escape by working at a local water park, where his boss (Sam Rockwell) fathers him in a way no one at home can. The movie has a huge and wonderful ensemble cast who are all given delightful characters and lines.
