There may be no star in Hollywood more likable than Steve Carell, but he’s spending this year testing the limits of that likability. He was recently seen as a womanizing jerk in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, and he’ll finish out 2013 by playing a murderer in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, but in between, we’ve got The Way, Way Back, where Carell is cast as a dickish stepfather-to-be to our hero, awkward teenager Liam James. In fact, Carell was so convincing as a “hunky creep” in the film that it dominated the post-premiere chatter at Sundance … well, at least until the movie itself sold for nearly $10 million to Fox Searchlight. Was the price tag worth it for this fairly mainstream coming-of-age dramedy? All we’ll say is that Allison Janney’s supporting performance as a drunken neighbor, glimpsed briefly in this trailer, is surely worth its weight in gold.
