IN & OUT | A DEVILISHLY SWEET COMEDY
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK | MAINSTREAM AMERICAN audiences are still tender young buds when it comes to embracing, or even just accepting, homosexuality in the movies. It's not surprising that a serious, passionate on-screen kiss between two guys is still an exceedingly rare thing, considering that legions of real-life guys still feel compelled to leave an empty seat between them when they go to the movies with their buddies. Patently offensive movies like "The Birdcage" haven't helped: That picture was really just a nosegay of fag jokes for the Dodge Caravan set, an excuse for them to pat themselves on the back for their imagined hipness. And movies that set out to illuminate and educate with weepy sanctimony, like "Philadelphia," may be a step in the right direction when it comes to teaching acceptance -- but who wants art that teaches anything so blatantly? And at some point, wouldn't it be nice to have gay characters who are more than just props for a civics lesson? That's why "In & Out," for such a devilishly sweet-tempered little picture, seems almost like a big deal. It isn't a daring film -- it's safe as milk, a movie you could take your mother to -- but it's a sly one. Of course, there's an agenda here: Its lessons on tolerance are written plainly between the lines of its wry jokes, but they're not so loud and booming that they overwhelm the movie's charm. And the big message that writer Paul Rudnick ("Jeffrey") sends out to middle America, even as he makes them laugh, isn't "Gay people are all around you, so you'd better get used to it." It's much less "threatening" than that, and yet it cuts closer to the bone: "Gay people are all around you -- and they're people you already like." Inspired by the way Tom Hanks clumsily outed his high school drama teacher during his Oscar-acceptance speech for his performance in "Philadelphia," "In & Out" is the story of Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline), a beloved small-town English teacher who's polite and fastidiously groomed, who carefully tucks one leg of his crisp poplin pants into his sock before he mounts his bicycle, and who happens to love Barbra Streisand. He's about to marry fellow English teacher Emily (Joan Cusack), to whom he's been engaged, chastely, for three years. Just a few days before the wedding, one of his former students (Matt Dillon), who's gone off to Hollywood and made good, wins an Academy Award (for his portrayal of a gay soldier in a movie called "To Serve and Protect") and dedicates it to Brackett. "And he's gay!" Dillon blurts out midspeech, triumphantly, in direct, hilarious counterpoint to Hanks' rambling, backhanded eloquence. Brackett, watching at home while snuggling on the couch with his betrothed, squeals and flings his remote out the open window. Of course, everyone in town wants to know if it's really true, including Brackett's flannel-shirted, work-booted, beer-drinking buddies, who've planned to show "Funny Girl" at his bachelor party -- not just because he likes it, but because they like it too (he turned them on to it when he hosted a Barbra festival in his living room). And Howard, who seems to believe with all his heart that he isn't gay, does his best to convince his friends and colleagues that he's as straight as John Wayne, so he can go on with his wedding as planned. But the media have already descended on the little town, and on Howard. And when sleazy tabloid-TV reporter Tom Selleck (in a surprisingly likable, shrewd performance) reveals to Howard that he's gay and plants a hard, passionate wet one right on his lips, Howard realizes the truth -- and comes out, publicly, at his own wedding. "In & Out" is a fable about small-town America, a hopeful affirmation that tolerance can find a home in the darnedest places. Howard's friends don't turn against him when he comes out; they're just confused -- but the big joke is, they're not as confused as he is. Kline's performance is polished and elegant: He plays his befuddlement as a delicate joke, not a broad, silly one. In one of the movie's funniest bits, a discouraged, troubled Howard resorts to a self-help tape on how to be a "manly man." When it tells him to stand straight and tall, and he rests one hand on his hip, the voice on the tape booms, "Excuse me -- are we a little teapot?" And when it informs him that "truly manly men do not dance" and that he must "at all costs avoid rhythm, grace and pleasure" -- against an aural backdrop of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" -- you can almost see him trembling as he tries to resist. But when he finally cuts loose, he doesn't resort to a mix of spangly Michael Kidd twirls and kicks. What you see when he moves is sheer exuberance and irrepressibility, cut with lots of goofiness. It's freedom, not campiness, that makes you laugh. The movie swirls around Kline a little too much -- he's a brilliant comic actor, but he isn't allowed to cut loose as much as we'd like, to show us the slightly loony person we know is lurking beneath this ultrasane character's veneer. And director Frank Oz doesn't know how to give Rudnick's whip-smart lines the snap-crackle-pop they deserve. He has no gift for timing. Often the characters' lines are left hanging too long in midair, or the camera lingers on a visual long after we've gotten the joke. But the actors make a tight ensemble regardless. Dillon, as movie heartthrob Cameron Drake, is a shambling, mumbling sweetheart behind his hip sunglasses, facial hair and peroxide 'do. And Cusack, with her Campbell's Soup Kid pout and her sailor's swagger, is especially winning. One of the movie's jokes is that she's banked all of her self-esteem around her wedding to Howard, but when her dream is crushed, Rudnick is smart enough to pull back a bit and stop making fun of her. Still dressed in her frothy wedding gown, she makes an impassioned speech to Howard about why she fell in love with him -- he made her feel beautiful, and she wanted him to show her "the whole world" of art and beauty (the same reasons so many straight women often fall for gay men, platonically or otherwise). Shortly thereafter, though, she flat-out decks him, and you know she'll get by just fine. Rudnick's movie takes one misstep: The stunning supermodel Shalom Harlow has a small role as Dillon's supermodel girlfriend, and Rudnick goes out of his way to make her character seem stupid and shallow. The bulimia jokes he's written for her represent a hateful kind of snottiness, the kind you sometimes get from those gay men who don't really like women, and they don't ring true against the rest of Rudnick's script. But aside from that, Rudnick's narrative works because he's neither a sap nor an insufferable smart-aleck: His movie is flip and easygoing, but its heart beats steady and true. We're not simply invited to laugh at a character's flamboyance, as if he were a creature in a zoo. Rudnick wants to show us a real person, but he wants to laugh with us, too, which is why he's not afraid to make jokes that beg the question, "Come to think of it, why do we all like Barbra so much?" Instead of pussyfooting around the audience, he beckons it out on the dance floor for a little rhythm, grace and pleasure. You have nothing to lose, he says, except your two left feet.
Stephanie Zacharek is a regular contributor to Salon.
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PHOTO BY ANDY SCHWARTZ, COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES
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