Outside Providence reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Don't Look for Mary Outside Providence

True confessions this time. I actually liked a lot about last year’s gross-out funfest, There’s Something About Mary. There’s something about that movie—the energy, the logic or at least consistent illogic, the sheerly obnoxious fun. With a certain uncertain sense of hope I approached Outside Providence, the advertising for which stresses its connection to the previous film. That connection is the producer-writer-director team of the Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, who have developed a sort of trademark movie with Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and of course Mary.

Yet, for Outside Providence, they teamed with director Michael Corriente to produce a decidedly off-the-mark coming of age story which tries to keep a bit of Mary in its heart. The young man reaching for or perhaps trying to avoid adulthood is Timothy Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy), called Dunph by his pals and called by his father a word that means a sex toy (a word I’m not ready to share with Peanut.org readers). Dunph gets by and high with a little help from his buddies in mid-seventies Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which looks even more depressing than I remember mid-seventies Providence being. (After Summer of Sam and Dick, let’s break out our leisure suits, since the seventies are rising again.)

After an accident involving a car, a parked police car, and the inevitable drugs, in a swirling twist of story and logic, Dunph is packed off not to jail but to an upscale boarding school, carrying his belongings in a plastic garbage bag. There’s nothing like verisimilitude, and in this movie, there is nothing like verisimilitude: he is soon keeping company with Jane (Amy Smart), the prettiest, smartest, least approachable young woman on campus, who looks as if she wouldn’t use a garbage bag if it had a Gucci trademark.

Dunph may change, but the change never rings true. He abuses a lot of drugs with his down and dirty pals in Pawtucket. He abuses a lot of drugs with his up and coming pals at Cornwall. Imagine Dead Poets Society starring Cheech and Chong, and you get the idea. Situations take the place of character development, but even the situations go nowhere. Throughout the film, Dunph’s father (Alec Baldwin) and his card-playing, beer-guzzling buddies provide a chorus of comment and criticism to Dunph’s story. Suddenly, they move to center-plot with one of them admitting that he is gay. As if embarrassed by the revelation, the film drops the character and the situation alike. One thing a Farrelly flick does not need is embarrassment.

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, once said if someone brandishes a pistol in the first act, someone must be shot before the end of the play. In its first few minutes, this film brandishes a three-legged, one-eyed dog following a kid in a wheelchair. After the first five minutes or so (the best minutes of this film), the dog is never seen again—except in the ads for the film—and the kid is left to spin his wheels.

The great strength of film as a medium is that the story is shown, not told. Yet, in this film, much of the showing is reduced to predictable images of prep school high (in some sense or other) jinks, with stereotypical characters—does the token Jewish kid have to be on the receiving end of the cruelty of students and teachers alike? What should be the emotional climax of the film, when Dunph and his father discuss his mother’s death, is so wordy and contrived, so much more told than shown, that I would not have allowed it in my high school drama classes.

Nothing much feels right or consistent about this film, least of all, the ending. I wonder whether it was tacked on in response to the response of preview audiences. Or, perhaps the ending was chopped off, because the film does not come to a close. It just quits. Gee, now we can look forward to a sequel in which Jane and her new boy friend get matching Ph.D.’s, while Dunph and his buddies flip burgers at McDonald’s and flip out with their recreational chemicals.

This isn’t a film to get worked up about, one way or the other, no matter how much I may rove around its various shortcomings. But, now, let’s pause for a rave. The humor we have come to expect from the Farrelly brothers depends on body parts, body functions, and body fluids—not exactly the stuff of Sunday school lessons. Most of the humor of Outside Providence, however, depends upon drug abuse by teenagers.

There’s a contradiction there. Teenagers abusing any drug (including alcohol), driving around town with less than complete command of their minds and automobiles—that is just not funny. To be honest, there may be another contradiction here, since this is written by a middle-aged curmudgeon with a glass of wine nearby. But he is a curmudgeon who tries his best to keep his feet dry, his heart full of noble thoughts, and most importantly, his car in the driveway after he’s had even one glass of wine.