In & Out
The easygoing Kevin Kline / Joan Cusack comedy that unhardened a few hearts.
In & Out (1997). Grade: B-
I’m sure you know the gist of the plot. For a refresher: kindly middle-aged schoolteacher Kevin Kline is getting married in a few days, to longtime girlfriend Joan Cusack. They’re watching the Oscars, where one of their former students is nominated for Best Actor (playing a gay soldier who’s drummed out of the military). That former student wins… and thanks Kline as the gay teacher who inspired him! Which is news to Cusack & Kline, and to their small town…
The idea for this came from Tom Hanks’s Oscar speech after he won for Philadelphia. The success of that movie did draw attention to a retired teacher who Hanks admired, and the teacher was perfectly fine with coming out in the press. Hollywood super-producer/giant jerk Scott Rudin (funny how often those two things go together) wondered, what if the speech had outed someone by accident? Rudin hired the very funny Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values) to write the script. (That’s what super-producers do; they provide the “idea,” other people do the creative work, and the super-producer gets the biggest chunk of money.)
It was Rudnick who came up with the twist of making the teacher someone about to get married. Basically, it’s the plot of The Philadelphia Story, or any number of other classic old comedies. Someone’s about to get married when a stranger or an old flame shows up, gumming up the wedding plans and causing chaos.
There’s three main jokes in the movie. One is Kline insisting that he’s not gay, despite having a few stereotypical gay interests; he worships Barbra Streisand movies, for example. (For the first few minutes of WALL-E, I assumed the robot was gay for the same reason.) The second is poking fun at some of the manly-man folks in town for their gay paranoia (like some members of the high school sports team). And the third is that if Kline messes up the wedding, he’s going to make some people VERY upset.
That last one is the only time the movie gets really, madly great for a moment; circumstances do mess up the wedding, a bit, and Joan Cusack just FLIPS OUT. Which she’s completely justified in doing! The expression her face scrunches into when the wedding gets interrupted is absolutely gold. I can’t even describe it; it’s safe to say that’s a face nobody’s ever done in comedy before. It’s a first. Although Oscars are dumb, it’s nice that she got a nomination for this. (And lost to someone in L.A. Confidential, yawn.)
The stuff with Kline insisting he's straight is amusing (he's very talented) but a little too tame, maybe? It’d almost be funnier if he WAS 100% straight (or mostly straight, nobody’s 100% anything), and just happened to be a nice, well-dressed, non-macho, Barbra-loving straight guy. Heck, rock and roll was mostly banned in our home (because it would make us gay), while every classic Broadway showtune was allowed. So I definitely do know the words to “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair.” And I’m 100% straight… except that nodody’s really 100% anything.
There’s a fun scene where Kline has bought some kind of self-help tape called “Release Your Masculine Power” or some such. As the tape guides him through how to be all he-manly, Kline responds to its instructions, and the tape knows in advance how he’ll respond. It’s very much an idea I could imagine in an old comedy with, say, Danny Kaye listening to a self-help record.
A few years ago, some writers at the “Decider” website did a look back at 1990s movies with prominent gay characters or themes. And author Joe Reid had mixed feelings about In & Out; that its heart was in the right place, yet didn’t really seem to be a movie about gay people for gay people.
I get that; I also get that the concept someone could discover a whole new sexual identity in a matter of a few days is pretty silly. Although, again, I think Rudnick was going for that kind of old-movie vibe where characters find out life-changing things about their own personalities on the spur of the moment, or the spur of the plot.
And I think some of the frustration Reid has with the movie isn’t in the way it was concieved or intended; I think some of it’s just because Frank Oz is a pretty terrible director. He was a terrifically talented puppeteer, of course, but skill at one thing does not mean easy skill at another. Unfortunately, his movies made enough money that he kept getting jobs. Even though he’s really almost in John Landis territory.
The one Oz movie I really love, Little Shop of Horrors, I basically just love for the Ashman/Mencken songs; Oz’s staging of the songs is pretty darn hamhanded, for the most part. And something about the tone is just a shade off in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, or What About Bob, or Death at a Funeral. Even when Oz has good actors/comedians, he often seems to step on their performances to be more obvious.
Take a scene here where Kline does a little dance routine; it’s funny because Kline is funny. (And he was in Broadway musicals, so he’s got dance experience.) But Oz keeps cutting into the dancing to show us closeups of feet moving. If Kline couldn’t do the routine, then work with him to develop one he can do! And just let him do it, stop with extraneous cuts and closeups! That’s how good dance sequences were shot in the 1940s, just follow how they did it!
I wish someone else had directed this movie; although, granted, there weren’t many good conventional directors making comedies in the period. Maybe Christopher Guest, or Elaine May? Joan Micklin Silver? Oh, well. We have what we have, and it’s got Cusack & Kline, and they’re good enough. (Plus Bob Newhart with a small turn as a weasely school principal, and Debbie Reynolds as the mom who DEMANDS a fairytale wedding… and the way that works out is rather touching, actually.)
Writer Paul Rudnick said of the film, “I was especially eager to do a coming-out story that was in no way tragic … I thought even while there are stories about people facing terrible rejections from their families and communities—and those are entirely valid—I wanted to try something that was more along the lines of using coming out as a romantic-comedy device.”
I can say from personal conversations — several of them — that this approach did get through to some mild homophobes I knew or worked with. People who would never have gone to see Philadelphia, much less Wilde or My Own Private Idaho. Well, they saw this, and laughed at it, and maybe that helped them overcome a few hangups, who knows. (It also didn’t hurt that manly-man Tom Selleck is in this, and very funny — he didn’t always hawk reverse mortages on TV, you know.)
I sometimes think of that when I see Issues Movies today, ones that purport to teach audiences lessons about representation, discrimination, etc. Who’s the audience? If it’s the arthouse audience, the “prestige cable” audience, well, they already agree with whatever you’re teaching a lesson about. That’s fine if it’s a story you feel driven to tell — by all means, then, tell it! But don’t kid yourself that you’re doing something important; very few of us are.
If you really want to get through to people, though… making them laugh is never gonna hurt your cause. Although, sometimes, you just can’t win. Rudnick remembered a test audience member who rated the movie highly in all respects, but wouldn't agree with recommending it to a friend; she wrote “No, against God’s law.”
‘“That’s the kind of thing you either find tragic, heartbreaking, hateful, or hilarious, and I thought all of [the] above,” Rudnick says now. “If we gave her everything a Hollywood movie comedy could offer and she still had this residual resistance to it, that seemed, among other things, insane.’”
Who knows what kind of movie that audience member would recommend? Let’s see, what else came out in September of 1997? Well, there was The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. And a week after In & Out came out, there was The Ice Storm, which also had a good performance by Kline. But, probably they wouldn’t have approved of that, either.