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.