IN & OUT -a review by Bill Chambers ** (out of four)
starring Kevin Kline, Matt Dillon, Joan Cusack, Tom Selleck screenplay by Paul Rudnick directed by Frank Oz
In & Out passes for satire in 1997.
Kline stars as Howard Brackett, a dedicated high school teacher engaged to the lovely Emily (Cusack). One of his past students, Cameron Drake (Dillon), is up for an Academy Award, for a film about a homosexual army soldier titled "To Serve and Protect". Brackett is happy as a clam, until Drake wins and outs his favourite teacher before the world. Over the next three days, Brackett has to decide whether or not to deny the charge and carry on a charade by marrying his fiancee, or take the advice of gay newscaster Selleck, and jump from the closet.
Rudnick, an openly gay screenwriter, is frequently a razor sharp wit, and no character, straight or gay, is spared. Take supermodel Shalom Harlow (an Oshawa, Ontario, Canada native, and once a schoolmate of mine!), who, as Drake's waif-girlfriend, doesn't want to leave her house at one point because she still has to "shower and vomit." Or Wilfred Brimley, as Brackett's father, who loves his son unconditionally, even if he "got drunk, climbed the clock tower with a shotgun and took out the whole town." But amusing as it is--there are a great many belly laughs--the picture feels curiously cold, and the mechanics of the plot curiously manufactured, as if it were a bad script with a good dialogue doctor. The Oscar ceremony is virtually laughless, if only because it's the most off-target recreation of the event this side of The Bodyguard. I realize that realism may not have been the goal of this sequence, but aren't imitations and impressions funnier when they're dead-on?
Kevin Kline is terrific, as always; Dillon's character starts out bitingly mean--is he doing Brad Pitt?--and then goes disappointingly soft. Selleck is good--Magnum P.I. fans everywhere will no doubt be shocked by a certain standout scene--in a TV-ready sort of way. Director Oz, who has in his lifetime voiced Fozzie Bear, Yoda, and directed the brilliant Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, has a good sense of pace, and his comic timing is often spot-on, but he lacks the edge to make a truly cynical movie, and so the proceedings are best described as wishy-washy.
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