Outside -- Looking In

Director Francis Ford Coppola may be best known for The Godfather films, but I've heard some speak of him with even more reverence for his adaptation of the S.E. Hinton novel, The Outsiders. It's considered by some to be the first "Brat Pack" film, and is stuffed to bursting with recognizable actors, including C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, and Diane Lane.

What struck me as odd about it was how unfocused it seemed to be. At a slim 90 minutes, I expected a simple and direct narrative. But instead, the movie's three acts are all strikingly different. They don't feel very related save for sharing common characters, and they don't have related emotional content either.

The first act is a "life in a 1960s greaser gang" tale. At times, it's so silly that it almost plays like Grease (or West Side Story) without the songs, like a movie playing purely for nostalgia and without much else to say. It brushes up against a few serious issues like the death of one's parents and child abuse, but pulls up long before landing a serious emotional punch.

But then the act is capped when a young boy is forced to murder another boy in defense of a friend. The two then take off on the run together, going into hiding to escape the police. Suddenly it's a buddies-on-the-road movie. Things do get more serious at this point, yet the film still steers clear of portraying any real psychological impact these events have had on either kid.

The emotion is all stored for the last act, after the kids have saved some school children from a fire -- leaving one of them crippled. Had these elements been the focus, the film might have managed in the end to be more profound and make more of an impact. But instead, the bulk of the last act is given over to a inter-gang rumble between the greasers and their rivals. Characters who've barely had a speaking line in the first hour of the movie suddenly come center stage.

This sort of meandering slice of life narrative probably played much better in novel form than I think it does on the screen. There are some moments of good acting, but the movie seems to try so hard to say something about so many things that it ends up not saying much of anything. I rate it a D+. As a platform to launch half a dozen great acting careers, it's a commendable movie. That's about all I think it has to offer.