Welcome to Xenith’s latest; an overheated mess of scurrilous, unfounded speculation and scathing opinion, perhaps the occasional review, skewering old or new screen offerings to virtual cork and pasteboard for the scrutiny of the collective cruel and grubby little boy with a magnifying glass.
As my sole qualifications for this gig are the acquisition of more useless trivia and credits of actors and directors than is healthy and thankless love of the ones that make and perpetuate the myths as much as cliché busting masterpieces, I don’t promise to be regular, scholarly or even to have any idea what I’m talking about. Rather, this column thrusts to the thump of my tub, for the flawed, the contradictory, the downright populist, and whatever I’ve been watching this week. Fusing all that with the hubris of competing directly against the millions of entertainment blogs out there brings us to the fumbling conception.
I begin with absolutely no discussion of the current Oscar contenders, one of those might-have-beens; the well-intentioned ‘issue’ movie that almost gets it right while bordering on the offensive, and wins a clutch of hideous gilded objects.
Oddly sidelined for a win by the Oscar committee, In and Out (1997) manages both to skirt the bear-maw of sentimentality that inevitably swallows many a promising idea (Forrest Gump, anyone?), and topple into it. Predating the current trend for the industry to prove how self aware and ironic it is, this film features one film’s laziest stock characters, the egg-cup shallow megastar (a monosyllabic Matt Dillon) who ticks award season boxes by playing a character with some type of physical or mental impairment, or one who belongs to a trendy persecuted minority. The opening fake-Oscar ceremony a joyous marshmallow spoof of backslapping star cameos and snippy in-jokes (Stephen Segal’s Best Actor nomination for ‘Snowball in Hell’ being my particular favourite), the winner a sledgehammer-subtle but all-too relevant indictment of Hollywood’s squeamishness when it comes to gay characters, and straight actors who play gay for accolades.
Ooh, cutting and cynical, no? Timely, even. On to the plot, then:
Popular high school English teacher and track coach Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) enjoys a neat, chaste, self-contained life in Greenleaf, Indiana, engaged for the past three years to fellow teacher and recovering binge eater Emily Montgomery (Joan Cusack), and one time English teacher of Cameron Drake, C-student done good.
The town congregates around their TV screens to cheer on one of their own, when Cameron, in an acceptance speech of supreme, good-natured stupidity, outs Howard to the town, and the nation. What follows is a breezy farce in which Howard has to contend with his family and fiancee’s confusion, a media invasion, and the barrage of limp-wristed stereotypes posited by his students.
While the film does very little to counter any of those, glibly equates sexuality with gender identity, and relies rather too heavily on Freudian slips and malapropisms, as in the ‘intersection’ scene, for laughs, I find I can’t bring myself to judge too harshly.
I want to hate In and Out, but can’t, with the slightly clumsy message of tolerance, and the tiniest of sly hints at a gay wedding, well before the present toxic US Proposition 8 debacle, while still treating Howard with disappointing squeamishness, so as not to alienate conservative filmgoers. Aside from the noted ten-second smacker forcibly planted on him, Howard’s sexual awakening isn’t exactly believable, and leaves him as much of a eunuch as before – strange for a film centred on this man’s sexuality, he gets the least action, or even romance, out of all the characters. All it takes for Howard to reluctantly come to terms with himself is the spurious, if very funny realisation that he can’t contain the urge to get down to that disco stomper on his ‘Be a Man’ self-help tape.
Bar the occasional painful moments when I felt like I’d stumbled into a sub-par Dead Poets Society, or indeed any film with the word wedding in the title by mistake, In and Out is a slice of enjoyable, if hardly groundbreaking entertainment. The film does indirectly raise a bugbear of mine: lack of equal visibility for female sexualities compared to the proliferation of dramas, films and dismal, tear-stained reality shows that feature gay/bi men. Barring sitcom innuendo and the occasional, terribly earnest storyline on ER, Casualty and the like, or as a device on Torchwood since a good proportion of the alien villainesses get their kicks kissing girls; I was suitably intrigued this week by the introduction of a clever, hard-as-nails maybe lesbian in the latest series of Skins. More on Skins, and on the perils of being a TV teen soon.
Still, Kline is warm, likeable, and adept at the physical comedy required by the title role. Tom Selleck, bit player and moustached-man’s icon, proves sprightly and fun, while never quite relinquishing his defining characteristic (being a sleazy hack, doing his utmost to hide the big, beating heart beneath that hairy chest). Joan Cusack continues her repertoire of shrieking neurotics, alongside tons more of my favourite recurring movie clichés. The wedding has more frills and awful dancing than you can shake a stick at, a stiff-shirted power-hungry high school principal, small town oddballs, and teenage meatheads with infinitely more sensible girlfriends. Best of all is Debbie Reynolds, and her genteel Arsenic and Old Lace caricature of a sweet, slightly dotty old dear with a barely concealed core of steel. This from an actress who I’ll adore forever for Singin’ in the Rain, now spending her dotage playing the kind of twinkly Marple-esque woman who wouldn’t dream of setting foot outside the house without hat and gloves, never raises her voice and probably packs a shiv in her knitting bag.
Uncomfortable assumptions and theoretical shiv included, In and Out isn’t a great film, somewhat dated and rather muddled in its aims, and may even have done more harm than good in some quarters, but it remains a necessary step while films like Brokeback Mountain and the actors therein attract praise and censure for reasons other than the quality of filmmaking.
