Don Handfield | Through the Shattered Lens

Throughout the late 90s, a rather obscure film from 1995 called A Reason To Believe used to show up on Cinemax fairly frequently. I was 11 when I first saw it. At the time, I was indulging in my rebellious streak by secretly staying up past my bed time and sneaking into the living room, where I would watch whatever forbidden sordidness what being aired. Because I didn’t want to wake anyone up, I would watch with the volume turned almost all the way down. Hence, when I first saw A Reason To Believe, I literally had to sit less than an inch away from the TV just so I could hear the dialogue.

And I remember that, at the age of 11, A Reason To Believe really blew me away. I thought it was one of the greatest films that I had ever seen. The fact that the film involved college students made me feel like I was both watching a movie for adults and getting a preview of what life would be like when I was older. All of the sex and the language made me feel like I was getting away with something while I was watching it. At one point, there was a shot of Sharon (played by Holly Marie Combs) putting a condom on Wesley’s (Danny Quinn) erect penis and I found myself glancing over my shoulder, convinced that at any minute a responsible adult was going to enter the living room and say, “WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING!?”

So, when I recently rewatched A Reason To Believe, I did so wondering how the film would hold up now that I’m an adult. Not surprisingly, a good deal of the film now seemed to be heavy-handed. For every good line in the script, there was a line that was way too obvious. Characters who were funny when I was 11 — like dorky stoner Potto (Keith Coogan) — now seemed to be annoying. And, of course, my more experienced eyes immediately realized that Holly Marie Combs was putting that condom on a prosthetic penis.

And yet, A Reason To Believe is still fairly effective and probably deserves to be better known than it actually is. Usually, I refuse to give extra credit for good intentions but I’m willing to make an exception for A Reason To Believe because the film deals with a subject that, now more than ever, needs to be dealt with.

Charlotte (Allison Smith) is a student at an unnamed generic university. When her boyfriend, Wesley (Danny Quinn), has to go away for the weekend, he asks Allison not to go to Viking, an annual party thrown by his fraternity. Charlotte promises that she won’t but then goes anyway. At Viking, she hangs out with Wesley’s best friend, Jim (Jay Underwood). Jim is also dating Allison’s friend, Judith (Kim Walker). Realizing that she’s had too much to drink, Allison attempts to leave the party but instead, Jim leads her into his bedrom. He kisses her. She says no but Jim forces himself on her. Repeating all the old bullshit excuses (i.e., Charlotte was flirting with him, all girls say no when they mean yes, and all the rest) Jim seems to truly believe that the sex was consensual. Charlotte knows it was rape.

At first, Charlotte doesn’t want to face what happened. When she finally does go to the university administration and reports what happened, the frat — including her boyfriend — comes together to protect Jim. Charlotte’s friends — like Judith — abandon her. Her only supporter is Linda (Georgia Emelin), an anti-fraternity campus activist who is more interested in Charlotte as a means to an end than as a human being.

A Reason To Believe held up fairly well. Yes, it’s heavy-handed and a lot of the dialogue is too spot-on and literal. I could have done without the scenes featuring Obba Babatunde as a bombastic professor. However, Allison Smith and Jay Underwood both gave excellent performances in the two lead roles and the film deserves a lot of credit for not shying away from just how misogynistic the fraternity/sorority culture can truly be. Ultimately, flaws and all, it’s a valuable, realistic, and angry portrayal of rape culture and it deserves to be seen for that reason.

It can currently be viewed on YouTube.

Eriq La Salle in Inside Out

Welcome to the suburbs!

It’s a world of secrets and lies, where friends spend their time exchanging gossip and no one’s marriage is that happy once you get behind closed doors. It’s a place where any sign of nonconformity is viewed as being a threat and where everyone is desperate to be a neighborhood insider because being an outsider is Hell on Earth.

The suburbs have also been the setting of a countless number of Hollywood melodramas. I’ve reviewed a few of them, like Sin In The Suburbs, over the past two weeks. The 2005 film Inside Out continues the cinematic tradition of casting a skeptical eye on the suburbs and it actually works pretty well, up until about the final 10 minutes of the movie. Yes, Inside Out is one of those movies that basically starts out strong and then ruins it all by building up to a thoroughly ludicrous final twist.

Don’t get me wrong. I love twist endings when they work. When they don’t work, they lead to something like Inside Out.

Inside Out starts out well enough. Eriq La Salle plays a mysterious man who moves into an idyllic suburban neighborhood in the middle of the night. When his neighbors attempt to greet him, he simply responds with a cold glare and then proceeds to alienate them even more by loudly mowing his lawn in the middle of another night. When he decides to hold a sudden garage sale, everyone is surprised to discover that he’s not selling the usual second-hand stuff. Instead, he’s selling expensive and new electronics and valuable antiques. When one neighborhood woman asks why he’s selling all of it, La Salle simply replies that they once belonged to his son.

Finally, La Salle does start to socialize with one neighbor (played by Steven Weber) but the friendlier that La Salle is, the more suspicious Weber becomes. Weber cannot bring himself to trust his new neighbor and instead, he starts his own investigation. As Weber finds out more and more about La Salle, he starts to grow more and more paranoid….

And, up until the final 10 minutes, the entire movie is actually kind of working. Director David Ogden is keeping things nicely off-center. Weber is both sympathetic and somewhat frightening as he grows more and more paranoid. Best of all, Eriq La Salle creates a character that seems to radiate a very genuine sort of menace. You really want to know what La Salle is hiding in his basement and you worry what will happen to Weber once he inevitably breaks in La Salle’s house to investigate…

And then, out of nowhere, the film launches one of the biggest and stupidest twists in the history of the movies. No, you won’t see it coming. Yes, you will be shocked. But not because the twist is effective or surpising. No, the twist is shocking because it makes no sense, it comes out of nowhere, and it is just amazingly stupid.

And that’s a shame because there’s a lot of talent on display in this film.

Is the film worth seeing despite the twist? Perhaps. It shows up on Encore occasionally and I would recommend it on the strength of Weber and La Salle’s performances. As I said, there’s a lot to appreciate during the first 80 minutes of the film. But, before it reaches that twist, you might want to stop the film and come up with a better ending of your own.