Viking Night: The Outsiders
By Bruce Hall
August 25, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“Wow, you really did that. I am amazed. Please accept a pile of awards for your efforts.”
I don’t know if that was the case with The Outsiders, but when you look at the team on paper, it certainly looks like a squad built to win now. The director of Patton, The Godfather and Apocalypse now brings you a powerful coming of age story based on one of the most popular Young Adult novels of the 1960s - starring some of the hottest young stars of the 1980s! C. Thomas Howell! Matt Dillon! Ralph Macchio! Patrick Swayze! Rob Lowe! Emilio Estevez! Diane Lane! Leif Garrett! Some guy with horrible teeth and scary eyebrows who calls himself Tom Cruise! Holy crap, that’s like pulling names out of a hat and coming up with the 1985 Bears!
There was no way of knowing back then, but this was a cinematic Fantasy Draft of monumental proportions. Looking back, The Outsiders should have been one of the best films ever made. And some people think it was. I am not one of them, but by God I can see how they tried! Unfortunately, you don’t get points for effort, so much as you get points for whether or not a movie moves you to want to see it a second time. You’ve made a great film when at the end of it, you think “I’m dying to know what happened to these people”, instead of “Sweet Jesus, that was only 90 minutes? It felt like 900!”
But it’s not all bad. The Outsiders starts out pretty well; so much so that you might think you’re in for a different movie than the one you’re eventually going to end up watching. The place is Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the time is 1965. The young adult community has a social pecking order, and it dictates that you belong to the “Greasers”, which meant you were a leather-wearing hood from the wrong side of the tracks, or the “Socs” (pronounced “soshes” as if Sean Connery were trying to introduce himself to Sammy Sosa), which meant you had nicer clothes, but still enjoyed beating people up in your spare time. I did not know anyone in Tulsa had money, but I assume that this part of the story was either educational, or that there was a sci-fi element I happened to miss. Suffice it to say there are two cliques - the haves and the have nots. And in case you were wondering, they don’t like each other very much.
So it becomes a problem when senior Greaser Dallas Winston (Dillon) takes a couple of scrubs out on the town for an evening of larceny, violence and general douchebaggery. Ponyboy (Howell) and Johnny (Macchio) are barely old enough to get zits, so they’re a little out of their element when Dallas tries (unsuccessfully) to romance a pair of Socs named Cherry (Lane) and Marcia (Michelle Meyrink). But Johnny and Ponyboy aren’t quite like the other Greasers, and Johnny displays remarkable maturity in defusing the situation, leaving the girls with a good impression.
Their boyfriends are less amused, and corner Ponyboy and Johnny at a park later that night. A fight breaks out, and Johnny stabs someone in self-defense. This is important, because the Greasers and Socs exist in a universe run by a strict set of social standards whereby unlimited fighting is allowed, as long as no weapons are involved. You should see it - a whole parking lot full of dudes in leather jackets and cashmere sweaters will be punching each other in the face, and the moment someone pulls a knife you’d think everyone saw a unicorn. But murder is murder, and it must be avenged, even among backwater juvenile delinquents who’ve never seen a knife cut anything but Salisbury steak.
The two gangs decide to settle the score by staging a “rumble,” which is where a bunch of dudes in leather jackets and a bunch of dudes in cashmere sweaters punch each other in the face until one side runs away. While this is happening, Dallas spirits Ponyboy and Johnny out of town, instructing them to ride out the heat at an abandoned church. Given time to reflect on their lives, the boys start to re-think their direction in life, and gang members on both sides begin to question the circle of violence and schoolyard covenant that defines their existence. It sounds like a simple story, but apparently it’s not. Things get convoluted fast, and I had to check twice to make sure this thing was only 91 minutes.
The problem is that there are too many characters with too many subplots, and they don’t exactly converge nicely. It makes the story feel longer and far more complex than it needs to be. It results in the middle of the film becoming bogged down with long, expository conversations that are intended to add depth but more often feel maudlin and trite. Macchio delivers a breakout performance, but hearing him say “Sometimes I wish my dad would hit me just so he knows I’m there” kind of makes me do that half-wince, half-eye roll thing I do whenever a Kardashian speaks. And Ponyboy, as the closet intellectual of the group, is a bit much, with his having apparently memorized the collected works of Robert Frost. But to his credit, Howell, who I’ll mention again in a moment, makes it work.
And just to make sure I get all of the negative out of my system at once, I need to mention that it’s even harder to take dialogue like this seriously with Carmine Coppola’s somewhat colorless score blaring nonstop for almost the entire film. It’s beyond obnoxious; it makes me want to switch to subtitles. It’s not that this isn’t a decent film, or that its intentions aren’t good. It’s just that the movie feels like it loses focus, veering off in a half dozen different directions for 90 poorly paced minutes when a more structurally sound 120 might have served the material better. This won’t be the first film I’ve said this about (St. Elmo’s Fire comes to mind…), but The Outsiders is probably more famous for who’s in it than for how good it really is, because it’s only “kind of” good.
But wait, I really do have praise! For the most part, the acting is legit, and this cast isn’t legendary for nothing. Matt Dillon is downright chilling at times. In two strong performances, Howell and Macchio take their characters right up to the front door of “corny” but wisely choose to remain outside. Rob Lowe is a terrific actor, but no matter how much dirt you put on him he will never NOT look like a Regional Vice President of Marketing. Emilio Estevez is without question better here than he’s been in anything lately. Women are an afterthought, and while Diane Lane started the movie with a lot to work with, her character is relegated to the sidelines for nearly the entire film.
And by the way, I am one hundred percent comfortable enough with myself to say that Patrick Swayze was a god among men.
So believe me, there’s plenty to see, if you want to watch The Outsiders. Just be warned - it KNOWS it’s The Outsiders and it very much wants you to be impressed with that. It’s more than a little cloying, and there are too many characters and subplots for an hour and a half film to fully flesh out. But it has its moments, and is full of some very solid performances by some very well-known actors - before they were stars. The archaeological value alone is reason enough to watch. And, if you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when Tom Cruise is NOT the star of the movie, you’ll never have a better chance than this.