Even setting aside her boorish and distant husband-who earns our instant loathing with the single line "Maybe now I can get my wife back", especially because it's exactly the kind of sentiment many of us would voice-Carol never considered the life Chris imagines with her. But we begin to trust the depth of their relationship, in part by accepting the complexity built between two people over the unseen years prior to the movie's opening. Chris is a walking red flag, not just as an ex-con, but as an emotionally needy person who wants a relational intimacy Carol and her family are not equipped to bear. Millerĭirector Lynn Shelton brings a high empathic bar to Outside In, then dares the audience to clear it. Kaitlyn Dever and Jay Duplass in "Outside In." The Orchard / Nathan M. Just as his life outside of prison exists in a state of constant precarity (where even drinking a beer feels like an existential gamble), Chris' relationship with Carol teeters, especially when he strikes up a friendship with Carol's daughter, Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever). He's sweet, awkward and pushes a little too hard.
OUTSIDE IN FULL
His time in prison is relegated to 80 pounds of case file boxes in Carol's living room, as far behind him as the garage full of old stuff and the teenage BMX bike that becomes his only way to get around.ĭuplass plays Chris open, raw and unbalanced against Falco's Carol, a woman compromising with her own cautiousness, her eyes and sentiments probing and retreating in minute-to-minute uncertainty-the duo build landscapes between them just as evocative as Outside In's rainy, timber town regionalism. But Outside In is most concerned with Chris living in his new now. He was with friends who robbed and killed, but seemed to have had no awareness of what was about to transpire. We hear little about Chris' crime or his time in prison. Sleeping in his brother's garage, detached from his family, Chris only feels close to Carol, his former English teacher who secured his release as part of an End Mandatory Minimums campaign. Even for the people closest to him, like his brother Ted (Ben Schwartz), Chris is as much a reminder of how they failed him as he is a person. The people he knew wish him well, but there's no mistaking their distance-Chris has become a foreign object. But even worse than a changed world is his social alienation. And that's before he has to figure out cell phones. "No one drinks 7 Up anymore," his brother tells him. Outside In is not a drama about the prison system or a "just when I thought I was out" crime drama, but the danger of being crushed under that suffocating, uniquely American, context lends an otherwise sweet, romantic drama an excruciating, delicate poignancy.įree from prison after 20 years, Chris is dropped straight into a house party and a new, disorienting world. Outside In stays tight on that personal drama, as Carol and Chris navigate a relationship no longer held apart by walls and barbed wire. He pursues an intimacy with her that she's not ready to handle, particularly with the demands of raising a teenage daughter while also holding together a crumbling marriage. Dark possibilities loom over Outside In, not because the gentle drama lingers on them, but because they're tied to an outside context: the United States prison system.Ĭhris (Jay Duplass) is just out of prison and his only real connection in the larger world is his former English teacher, Carol (Edie Falco).
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