THERE is something reliably uncompromising about Ben Kingsley's acting, which is in itself neither good nor bad, but does he still need to chase away the ghost of his noble suffering in Gandhi? In the past 20 years he's always been striking in films
, from Bugsy to Sexy Beast, but lately he's been so busy as to seem indiscriminate, taking oddball roles in movies big and small, decent and dreadful.
One can only assume that he's trying to send out signals that he's game for anything when he pops up as the Hood in Thunderbirds, or as the boss-eyed swami who presides over a game called "stink-mop", in which his disciples get smacked in the face with mops dunked in urine – a move that pretty much sums up the experience of sitting through the rest of The Love Guru. Kingsley now brings his iron determination to startle us in The Wackness, a coming-of-age film about a young drug dealer in love which achieves some emotional traction before taking a predictable tilt.
The film is set all the way back in the 1990s. Luke (Josh Peck) has just left high school and is peddling marijuana from an ice cream cart. For all that, he's lonely and depressed – supplying the high school in-crowd parties, but never invited to stick around.
Kingsley, in a bad wig that looks like it's about to grow a tail and go burrow a hole somewhere, plays one of Luke's regular customers, his psychiatrist, Dr Squires, whose marriage has turned arctic.
Squires gets a vicarious kick out of his young patient, becoming Josh's pal, surrogate father and companion in misery. While highly medicated himself, he tells the lad: "You don't need medication, you need to get laid." He becomes disapproving, however, when Josh falls for his stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby, from Juno).
She is only looking for a weekend distraction; he's having a life-changing experience. In the cringey period slang exchange that gives the movie its title, she explains to Josh that while he only sees the "wackness" of life, she sees only the "dopeness".
It's a film that isn't without its charming moments; when our hero kisses the girl, and dances home, the pavement squares light up like a disco floor. However, too often it comes across as a snoozy version of The Graduate. Sadly, writer-director Jonathan Levine has chosen to convey excitement through the medium of old hip hop; it's like trying to convey excitement through old Ant and Dec records.
Presumably, we're supposed to find something touching in the bonding between the two men from different generations, but The Wackness is self-pitying when it's not patting its own back for its insightfulness, and the pill-popping Squires feels like a feral comic creation in what's supposed to be a melancholy film.
What's worse is that the film can't hear its own mixtape of clichés, especially its portrayal of women, who are either middle-aged and cruel, or young, ripe and on their way to being cruel – or prepared to snog Kingsley in a phonebox, as Mary Kate Olsen does in one scene.
When a surfeit of self-absorbed kookiness and angst is the outcome, maybe it's best to just say no.
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On general release from FridayThe full article contains 564 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
