Coming Of Age In The Summertime: The Way, Way Back, Edge Of Seventeen, And Other Cinematic Paeans To Adolescence

Summer vacations really are a different world in America. According to the movies, they’re a time to build memories and lifelong friendships and experience all manner of firsts. Also, they generally tend to focus on boys who inevitably learn how to be men. Personally, I can’t imagine how these experiences could possibly involve anything more serious than chafing swim trunks, awkward displays of piss-poor sporting abilities, and accidental homoeroticism in the communal showers, but, you know, the ‘magic of cinema’ and all that.

Closer to home, unless your family was lucky enough to go to the Gold Coast for a week or two, you had to make do with Wobbies World. Sadly, Nunawading lost its exotic appear somewhere around the age of seven.

My summer vacations were more likely to be spent slumming around the streets of Geelong with my friends or playing Sims Theme Park on my PC to the soundtrack of a rustling Thins packet and a 28.8 kbps dial-up modem. It’s far from the coming-of-age shenanigans that teenagers in movies like this year’s Sundance sensation The Way, Way Back get up to.

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It’s Way, Way Good

TV veterans Nat Faxon and Jim Rash — of Ben and Kate and Community respectively; they also won Oscars a couple of years ago for writing The Descendants — direct The Way, Way Back. Like many before it, this sun-drenched comedy follows socially awkward 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) as he navigates previously uncharted territories like love and popularity while on holidays with his mother (Toni Collette) and her cruel new boyfriend (Steve Carrell).

As good as Toni Collette and Steve Carell are as the parental figures, I mostly responded to the kids’ stuff. Liam James is quite something as the kid who takes a job at the local water park to get away from his depression, and AnnaSophia Robb continues to emerge as one of the strongest actors of her age as the love interest who’s become tired of the vacuous summer rituals of tanning and chasing boys. At its centre, the local water park ‘Water Wizz’ is like a getaway heaven, and its collection of employees — Owen (Sam Rockwell, who gets to dance in this role), Caitlyn (Maya Rudolph), and Lewis and Roddy (Faxon and Rash) — are almost too nice to be true, and Duncan finds their easygoing existence so captivating.

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On The Edge Of Seventeen

The Way, Way Back is another example of that familiar Hollywood obsession, the summertime coming-of-age film: full of bored teenagers in theme parks, looking to waste away their allowances over the humid summer days.

I’ve always had a soft spot for David Moreton’s Edge Of Seventeen (1998), about a young boy who somehow finds himself employed at the most homosexual amusement park in the country. Lucky for him, it all turns out well. With a cool soundtrack of ’80s new wave pop hits, fabulous costumes from the decade that fashion forgot, and all the spirit of Stevie Nicks’ 1982 hit of the same name, the film takes a surprisingly tender look at sexual awakening and first love through the lens of a fateful teenage summer.

Less successful is Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (2009). While stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are ideally matched as the film’s troubled young protagonists, it lacks the ’80s authenticity of Edge Of Seventeen (Ryan Reynolds in particularly looks like he stepped out of a modern-day model catalogue, not 1987 suburbia).

Adventureland‘s glossy Hollywood look is the complete opposite to Aaron Katz’s sublime, woozy mumblecore feature Dance Party, USA (2006). More in tune to reality, it’s a refreshingly empathetic look at teens and their ability to somehow communicate through furrowed brows and shrugged shoulders.

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Terror (And Boobs) Behind Ever Corner

Summer camps are even more prevalent in American cinema than theme parks; they’re as much a summer institution as Zooper Doopers. With a preference for sexy teen hijinks — think Wet Hot American Summer (2001) or Meatballs (1979) — and horny teen bloodbaths, the summer camp is an ideal setting for self-realisation, what with all the cosy camp counsellors and rambunctious kids.

The obvious example is the Friday The 13^th franchise, presently at its twelfth installment. Revelling in the clichés of the genre like no other franchise in history, hockey-masked Jason Voorhees typically goes through anywhere between 8 and 20 victims, mainly while they’re skinny dipping or having inappropriately-timed sexual liaisons in the shower.

Despite Jason’s infamy, the deliciously wicked twists and turns of Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983) perhaps most typifies the summer camp mythos. The bullied shy girl, the protective brother, the mean pony-tailed bimbo, the dim-witted camp counsellors… All the expected elements of the genre appear in this doozy. There’s even a bloody dance!

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The Time Of Your Life

Despite the often frivolous nature of these films, they can tell us a lot about not just teenage life, but the filmmakers as well. They are predominantly about the loss of innocence, those fleeting years where somebody isn’t quite ready to give up the carefree days of childhood, but eager to experience the freedom of adulthood. Filmmakers keep going back to the well for that very reason.

While many people like Duncan in The Way, Way Back don’t truly ‘come-of-age’ until their 20s (I know I didn’t), I think filmmakers see this as a time when possibilities are endless, and a way to rewrite their own tortured pasts. With teen culture becoming ever more focused on sexuality and maturity at a younger age, these sort of nostalgic, wistful paeans to an era gone-by are only going to strike with more and more poignancy. In that sense, The Way, Way Back should become a new summertime staple.

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The Way, Way Back opens in cinemas nationally tomorrow.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer and film critic from Melbourne, and currently based in New York City. His work has been seen online (Onya Magazine, Quickflix), in print (The Big Issue, Metro Magazine, Intellect Books Ltd’s World Film Locations: Melbourne), as well as heard on Joy 94.9.