Grace (Eva Amurri) hopes to attend college in the fall, but her mother (Susan Sarandon, Amurri’s real-life mother) has ruined Grace’s credit rating and squandered the family’s savings. Misfit Dorian (Anton Yelchin) has been kicked out of his adoptive family’s gated home and sent to live with his uncle. While spending the summer working together in a water park, Dorian and Grace hatch a plan to raise the money she needs for school and he needs to get away from it all: sell weed to the town’s upper-class phonies.

CRITIQUE

A coming-of-age tale is one of the easiest endeavors a writer can undertake, but it’s one of the hardest to pull off. Look at the number of movies, plays, books (both fiction and non-), comic books, albums, and television series that try. Now think about the ones that stand out. A drop in the bucket compared to the sum total, huh? It seems that regardless of how much purported truth goes into each and every one, most of them look recycled or prefabricated, as if everyone’s individual life story is somehow designed for mass consumption, pre-plotted to appeal to someone who’s already encountered and enjoyed a similar tale.

But you know what happens when familiarity starts to breed, and it’s more or less reached the point that if you’ve seen one of these stories, well, you know. And Middle of Nowhere certainly feels like something I’ve seen before.

Coming-of-age/slice-of-life stories shouldn’t be predictable. Sure, there are universal experiences, and it would incredibly hard to connect with something or someone that’s completely alien, but you shouldn’t be able to see everything coming. And you can see everything coming in the movie. Every scene you’d expect to see is trotted out, and they’re arranged in a neat line. And despite what all of those fudged bio-pics and inspirational sports flicks would have you believe, life’s not neat.

Middle of Nowhere never once feels like it’s dealing with anything other than movie life, and as a result it’s impossible to connect with it. It’s been processed and packaged to the point that connecting with it would be like connecting with a sheet of particle board or a jar of Cheez Whiz.

Writer Michelle Morgan, whose Hollywood career has up until this point consisted primarily of bit parts on television series, has assembled all of the standard bits and pieces here but hasn’t supplied them with any sort of context or connective tissue. Not only does the movie seem phony as a whole, its individual components don’t make much sense. The movie opens with Dorian attempting to drive away from his parents’ home, headed to Florida, the family’s maid in the seat next to him.

This triggers his father to send him away, but why? If this is the last straw, what came before? Dorian seems more restless kid than miscreant, so what’s the big deal? Grace’s family apparently has more dark secrets and buried skeletons than the residents of Yoknapatawpha County combined, but while everyone else in town seems to know about most of them, Grace and her sister (played by Willa Holland) are largely clueless. (The big one they somehow don’t know about I figured out the moment I first saw one of the involved characters.

I somehow immediately knew the movie would be lazy enough to go down that particular road.) Hell, Dorian and Grace’s relationship (which often plays as if it had been written with Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer in mind) doesn’t make sense; the reasons the movie supplies for their becoming friends and dealing partners don’t add up. And speaking of dealing, are we supposed to believe that a town that seems to be populated almost entirely by bored, disposable-income-flush teenagers wouldn’t already be swarming with pot dealers?

According to the text summary on this release’s packaging, Middle of Nowhere is “a witty, warm-hearted comedy.” It’s not. You could make the argument that at various times it tries to be all of those things, but it never succeeds. What’s meant to be funny never is, and what’s meant to be touching never is. And it’s sure as hell not witty; it’s too obvious and mundane to come within spitting distance of witty. But describing it as a “disjointed, rote bog” probably wouldn’t move many units, although it would be truthful.

In addition to the plot threads that go exactly where you’d expect, there are numerous ones that don’t go anywhere, as well as ones that are forced down paths they’d never take if the story were allowed to proceed organically. And the plots that run in every direction imaginable are matched by a tone that shifts and shifts and shifts, changing from scene to scene for no good reason.

Director John Stockwell (who seems like an odd choice for such a tale until you remember the water park setting, which gives him ample opportunity to shoot his female cast from the waist up [which pretty much undermines everything we’re supposed to believe about Grace]) treats the scenes of Dorian and Grace dealing as if he were helming a dopey teen comedy (over-cranked photography set to the music of obscure indie bands) and the emotional highs as if he’s going for TV-level melodrama. Face it--something’s obviously gone awry when the dramatic highpoints of a movie involve one character cutting her hair and another announcing she’s making pancakes.

THE VIDEO

The 1.85:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 25GB disc--is terribly uneven. Colors can often look very good (the movie was shot in Louisiana, and the native vegetation gives the transfer plenty to play with), and the same is true for close-ups and some medium shots. The image is a little soft, which wreaks havoc on long shots, and skin tones can get a little waxy at times.

The photography is very grainy; the encode handles this well enough whenever lighting isn’t pushed to any extreme, but some of the brighter exteriors and darker scenes cause trouble, with the grain turning into a mass of noise (even going so far as to look like exploding fireworks in one scene). And there’s one nighttime exterior that switches contrast with every shot; half the time Yelchin and Amurri look fine, but in some shots they look like they’ve either seen a ghost or come down with malaria.

THE AUDIO

The movie’s lackluster sound mix has been translated into a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track for this release. Dialogue is pretty much the whole show here, and it sounds fine enough. The surrounds are largely silent, although some minor ambiance and music bleed pop up on a few occasions. As for the low end--when the music stops, it does, too. No other audio options are included; English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

All of the extras here are presented in standard definition.

An okay making-of featurette (25 minutes) mixes clips from the movie, behind-the-scenes footage, and cast/filmmaker interviews.

A few deleted scenes (6 minutes) add nothing.

A few cast & crew interviews (11 minutes total) largely duplicate comments made in the making-of featurette, although here you can pick and choose which participant you wish to view.

Closing out the extras is the movie’s trailer.

FINAL THOUGHT

Middle of Nowhere is as artificial as cardboard, but not nearly as useful.