Beyond the Multiplex

"On the Outs": A scared-straight after-school special, but actually good
One film-critic cliché I definitely do not buy is the idea that audiences don't like didactic movies. "On the Outs" is a nearly classic fable about three teenage girls who make bad choices in tough situations and must face the consequences, and beyond the hip-hop soundtrack, gangsta attire and yo-wassup dialogue, it's as didactic as anything in Dickens or anything ever aired by ABC at 3:30 in the afternoon. It's also been racking up audience awards at film festivals around the world for more than a year, and gives every impression of becoming a breakout hit.

You could suggest that directors Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik (who are white) are marketing a form of inner-city porn, offering a look at the intimate lives of poor and desperate urban girls of color to middle-class film audiences. But I don't view "On the Outs" that cynically -- I have no doubt this movie will appeal to viewers of all races and classes. Sure, part of the appeal is getting to see young Latina and African-American actresses perform in the kind of big, complex roles they rarely get. But that wouldn't be enough if they weren't all pretty good, and if Silverbush hadn't written a compact, fatalistic little drama with its beats in all the right places.

Jersey City makes a great setting for this kind of movie -- above its rundown brownstones and low-end commercial strips, you can see the Manhattan skyline just across the Hudson River. Even with the murky production values of consumer-level digital video, this is a landscape of high visual drama. The lives we witness are no less fraught: Suzette (Anny Mariano) is a protected, naive girl bound and determined to get into trouble; Marisol (Paola Mendoza) loves her young daughter but can't stay off the crack pipe; Oz (Judy Marte) is an upstanding neighborhood entrepreneur, supporting her grandma and disabled brother by making and dealing drugs in large quantities.

Clearly the star here is Marte (also seen in "Raising Victor Vargas"), an androgynous tough cookie with a brilliant smile. Although the dealer who never uses (and who holds basically middle-class values) is by now a drug-movie archetype, Oz never feels canned. As Marte plays her, Oz is alive to every moment, almost viciously protective of her slow-witted brother, Chuy (Dominic Colón), and visibly bearing the burden of her own mother's crack addiction. While the three-part structure of "On the Outs" is natural enough, Oz's sections are so much stronger that her tribulations become the spoke around which the whole movie turns.

Marisol's segment is the weepiest -- any parent will have trouble holding it together as she gradually realizes that her addiction has cost her the only thing she really cares about. Mendoza's acting is also the most mannered of the three, perhaps because she has to play such primal women's-movie scenes as being locked in a jail cell while screaming, "I want my baby!" Mariano is something of a blank slate as Suzette, but she gets to play opposite Clarence "Don" Hutchinson as Tyrell, her no good, very bad boyfriend, who is such a slinky, muscular, bedroom-eyed charmer that we can well believe a long list of dewy virgins have tumbled beneath him.

"On the Outs" offers hope and despair in predictable portions: All these girls have it tough, but the one with the most stable family situation seems destined to destroy herself, while the one with the best odds of ending up dead or serving 25-plus will find a way out. Whether we actually learn anything new from a movie like this -- or come any closer to "reality" -- I don't know, but those may not be the right questions. "On the Outs" is an American moral fable, as familiar as the Horatio Alger stories or Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," and our appetite for such tales of salvation and damnation is undiminished.

"On the Outs" opens Jan. 18 in New York; Jan. 20 in Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Washington; Jan. 27 in Austin, Texas, and Tallahassee, Fla.; Feb. 3 in Atlanta, Huntington, W.Va., and Westbrook, Conn.; Feb. 10 in Houston and Raleigh, N.C.; and Feb. 17 in Atlantic City, N.J., with more cities to follow.

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