You're a high school English teacher in a small Indiana town, watching the Oscars telecast with your fiancée, when one of your ex-students wins Best Actor for playing a gay soldier, and in his acceptance speech, he thanks various people, including the teacher--"who," he volunteers, "is gay." This comes as news to the fiancée. Also to the teacher, Kevin Kline. Also to his father Wilford Brimley in the same town, who tells his wife, "We used to mow our lawn. No more!" Also to the high school principal Bob Newhart who will in time attempt to fire Kline. Also to the football players that Kline coaches, though one of them says there are two places where it's OK to be gay: "Prison, and space, where they kind of float into each other while they're weightless." In and Out is a blithe, PG-13 rated comedy about homosexuality, so mild you can effortlessly picture it spinning off into a sitcom.
Everything that this B film for the Birdcage double feature has to say about masculine manner is summarized in a sole dance scene with Kevin Kline, a scene in which is unadulterated enjoyment. There he is, dressed like the legendary lumberjack man's man and practically alone, not including a hilarious surrealistically intrusive instructional tape that is supposed to teach him what real men, John Wayne-type men, do. Otherwise, the end product is a movie so mainstream that you can virtually watch it shrinking from confrontation, a film aimed predominantly at a middle-American heterosexual audience. Thirty years ago this movie would have been contentious. Now it's just droll.
Kline is more or less always reliable, if occasionally too broadly theatrical, as a comic actor, here playing an Everyman who struggles to maintain his self-esteem while his life disintegrates. Here he's well-matched with Joan Cusack, as Emily, the fiancée, who has lost dozens or hundreds of pounds under the encouragement of Richard Simmons, with the aim of trimming down for marriage to Kline. She's had a crush on him for years. Now, on the brink of the wedding, her whole world comes crashing down, and even the parish priest is dumbfounded that over a three-year relationship she has never once slept with her betrothed.
Kline attempts to solve that, crashing into her bedroom in an overdue exhibition of macho lust. One of my questions is why the former star student, in a clever, ironic performance by Matt Dillon, would tell a worldwide TV audience that he was. No matter; Kline becomes the target of a media onslaught, and a celebrity gossip journalist played by Tom Selleck appears in town to host a TV special detailing the real story.
Selleck's character is gay, and gladly ready to verify that information to everyone. He also presumes Kline is gay, in spite of his refutation. So does the high school principal, played by Newhart as a man so reticent and repressed that when he speaks, everything of significance is implied by lengthy, angst-ridden pauses. Joan Cusack, when not going too over the top, has some great moments like when she drones ''Weight has been lost!'' so firmly and gravely, as if saying, "Attention must be paid!" In and Out is decent half-conscious merriment, an audience pleaser with an ending that bogs it down. There's a scene in the high school auditorium that could have been reprocessed straight from Patch Adams or Dead Poets Society, and without giving it away, I will say that it is too prolonged, too cheap and too nauseatingly syrupy.
Everything that this B film for the Birdcage double feature has to say about masculine manner is summarized in a sole dance scene with Kevin Kline, a scene in which is unadulterated enjoyment. There he is, dressed like the legendary lumberjack man's man and practically alone, not including a hilarious surrealistically intrusive instructional tape that is supposed to teach him what real men, John Wayne-type men, do. Otherwise, the end product is a movie so mainstream that you can virtually watch it shrinking from confrontation, a film aimed predominantly at a middle-American heterosexual audience. Thirty years ago this movie would have been contentious. Now it's just droll.
Kline is more or less always reliable, if occasionally too broadly theatrical, as a comic actor, here playing an Everyman who struggles to maintain his self-esteem while his life disintegrates. Here he's well-matched with Joan Cusack, as Emily, the fiancée, who has lost dozens or hundreds of pounds under the encouragement of Richard Simmons, with the aim of trimming down for marriage to Kline. She's had a crush on him for years. Now, on the brink of the wedding, her whole world comes crashing down, and even the parish priest is dumbfounded that over a three-year relationship she has never once slept with her betrothed.
Kline attempts to solve that, crashing into her bedroom in an overdue exhibition of macho lust. One of my questions is why the former star student, in a clever, ironic performance by Matt Dillon, would tell a worldwide TV audience that he was. No matter; Kline becomes the target of a media onslaught, and a celebrity gossip journalist played by Tom Selleck appears in town to host a TV special detailing the real story.
Selleck's character is gay, and gladly ready to verify that information to everyone. He also presumes Kline is gay, in spite of his refutation. So does the high school principal, played by Newhart as a man so reticent and repressed that when he speaks, everything of significance is implied by lengthy, angst-ridden pauses. Joan Cusack, when not going too over the top, has some great moments like when she drones ''Weight has been lost!'' so firmly and gravely, as if saying, "Attention must be paid!" In and Out is decent half-conscious merriment, an audience pleaser with an ending that bogs it down. There's a scene in the high school auditorium that could have been reprocessed straight from Patch Adams or Dead Poets Society, and without giving it away, I will say that it is too prolonged, too cheap and too nauseatingly syrupy.