Outside In
OUTSIDE IN, drama, not rated, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles
Is a surprise party the first thing you’d want upon release from 20 years in stir? That’s what Chris ( Jay Duplass) gets on his return home, and it’s about as awkward as you’d imagine. Friends and relatives crowd around, applaud and toast, and ask him what his plans are. Chris smiles, a shy tucking up of bearded lips beneath an overhanging nose, mumbles a few monosyllables, and then bolts to the toilet to heave his guts.
None of these people paid him any mind, or many visits, while he was in prison for what we eventually learn was accessory to murder. He was involved in a liquor store break-in that went bad. The owner was killed, and the killer took off. Chris stayed to try to help the victim and was the one who took the fall. In other words, he’s a delinquent but decent guy in the wrong place with the wrong company at the wrong time.
The one person in his little Pacific Northwestern town who really stuck by him was his high school English teacher, Carol (Edie Falco). She visited, called, and worked tirelessly to obtain his release. He feels enormous gratitude toward her. And something more.
Director Lynn Shelton (Humpday) and Duplass collaborated on the script, which focuses on the awkward romance that develops between Carol and Chris, and on the Rip Van Winkle difficulties the fortyish Chris faces in dealing with the outside world for the first time in nearly a generation (texting? What’s that?). Carol must negotiate the suddenly very real presence of the man she’s spent the last two decades communicating with mostly by letter and phone call. None of this goes down well with her boorish husband Tom, with whom her relationship has grown sexually and personally inert.
There’s more sympathetic interest in the new arrival from Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever), the teenage daughter whose adolescent sullenness has been compounded by her mother’s neglect over the years of advocating for Chris. And that interest threatens to become a problem.
As Chris wheels around his rainy hometown looking oversized on his miniature bicycle, he looks and feels like a man out of place. His parole officer points out that people who get out of prison think they’re free, but they’re really not. Work is hard to come by. Relationships are hard to resume.
Falco is remarkable, sometimes radiant, sometimes anguished as she negotiates the pitfalls and pleasures of this awakening love story. Duplass is appealing, although there might have been a little more edge to the insights into what he’s going through. And Dever hits the right notes of moody adolescence. The movie suffers from a sententious guitar score that intrudes to let us know when it’s an important moment, but otherwise it wears its emotions well. — Jonathan Richards