Of God and Doofus Teens

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Bad attitude, bad wardrobe, bad study habits. Tim Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy) arrives at snooty Cornwall Academy with all that baggage spilling out of the trash bag he carries in lieu of the suitcase he can't afford.

In his working-class back-story there are drugs, drink and a feckless but funny bunch of buddies. Also a paraplegic brother, a three-legged dog and a widowed father (Alec Baldwin) for whom tough love is a family tradition, not a catch phrase. It is he who has sentenced his son to a last-chance senior year in prep school, which strikes him as a better, if more expensive, alternative to reform school.

Outside Providence--the title refers to Tim's native habitat, Pawtucket, R.I., as well as to the silence of God when it comes to doofus teenagers--works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. For the coming-of-age cliches don't stop once Tim settles in at Cornwall. There are a sadistic housemaster, a hidebound headmaster, a geeky roommate and a duplicitous pal to contend with, and the prettiest girl on campus (Amy Smart) to woo, ruin and redeem. One finds oneself asking how such familiar stuff breeds contentment instead of contempt.

Part of the answer, paradoxically, may lie in the way the film shamelessly, even joyously, keeps piling on that familiar material. At some point the sheer mass of it simply overwhelms dubiety. The fact that everything that happens in the movie comes as a surprise to its participants helps too. They apparently have not seen all the movies or read all the books about adolescent angst. So their responses are fresh. And felt.

That's particularly true of Hatosy. He's not so much a goofball as a radical innocent trying to pick up the clues to the preppie lifestyle but at the same time remaining fiercely loyal to his family and friends back home. It's a touching quality, and the actor engagingly lives it. Ditto Baldwin as his roughneck father, who has a depressive's shrewdness about other people's weaknesses as well as a depressive's inability to do anything about his own life, which consists mainly of railing at his children and playing poker with his boozy cronies.

These are both wonderful performances, with Baldwin's--coming on top of his superb movie-star parody in Notting Hill--opening up rich new territories for him to explore. But Outside Providence is full of glorious actor's moments, and may finally owe its success to them. One begins to think, If all these people believe so wholeheartedly in this enterprise, maybe I ought to as well.

Certainly it leads one to re-examine the premise of Peter and Bobby Farrelly. Up to now they have been our gross-out geniuses (Dumb & Dumber, There's Something About Mary), and Miramax wouldn't mind if you thought Outside Providence was more of the same. But adapting a novel by Peter and working with director Michael Corrente, the siblings, who also produced this film, maintain their best quality, which is a kind of unblinking frankness about our basic humanity, while skipping the bathroom jokes. You won't miss them at all.

--By Richard Schickel