Director Michael Corrente must be credited with the more humane parts of this atypical Farrelly Brothers outing. It's hilarious in spots, some provided by Alec Baldwin as a tough-guy father, others by his son's burnout friends. The lead, Sean Fatosy, plays a character named "Tim" but called "Dildo" by Baldwin. Fatosy is convincing as he navigates the intricacies of prep school, family matters, drugs, and affairs of the heart, and the emotional honesty of his portrayal holds the movie together. The outlines of the story are VERY familiar (it's sort of Cheech and Chong meet "Summer of '42"), but there are a lot of details which ring true. It's too spottily effective to pack a wallop (and I don't know what fans of the Farrelly's previous films will make of it), but I had a good-enough time to make me glad I went.
Review of Outside Providence
