It was in 1994 that Tom Hanks got to his feet at the Oscar ceremony and embarrassed himself by making one of those effusive, showbizzy thank you speeches.

The audience cringed. But the actor's embarrassment was minor compared to that suffered by the high school teacher he chose publicly to remember.

Hanks was collecting a Best Actor award for playing a gay lawyer in the film Philadelphia when he told the watching millions that his old drama tutor was one of America's heroic band of gay teachers. Unfortunately, if the newspaper reports of the time are to be believed, the man hadn't told those closest to him that he was gay.

I regale you now with this four year-old story because it represents everything you could possibly want to know about the plot of In & Out, a comedy starring Kevin Kline, which is released today.

A producer called Scott Rudin was watching the Oscars at home and decided to spin off a fictionalised story of Hanks' speech, imagining the effects on the teacher's life back in small town America.

His efforts have produced mixed results. On the plus side, the film - and especially Kevin Kline's performance - is very funny; sometimes infectiously so.

On the other hand - and this is where our British perception of "funny'' differs from that of the Americans - it's also unbelievably cloying in the way it portrays suburbia generally and its gay inhabitants particularly.

"It ends up offending everyone," someone said as we left the cinema. Ironic, really, since Rudin and his director Frank Oz had clearly been at pains not to say or do anything remotely controversial.

The film's saccharine quality is born of the fact that no one in it is in any way dislikeable. Even Tom Selleck's investigative reporter, who reveals himself to be gay, too, is little more than a comedy turn - as is Joan Cusack as Kline's fiancee, understandably peeved to learn that her intended may not be half the man she thought.

The Tom Hanks figure - home town boy turned Hollywood idol - is played by Matt Dillon, who is joined at the hip to his stick-like supermodel girlfriend (the real-life supermodel Shalom Harlow). "Can't you hurry up?" she asks him. "I've got to change and vomit before my show."

The film's overwhelming weakness is its conclusion - as cringe-making as Tom Hanks' original speech. I shan't reveal it here, save to say that for a moment, I thought I was watching a particularly mawkish episode of Happy Days. Sentimentality, it seems, is the price one has to pay for half-decent comedy in Hollywood these days.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.