Out to Sea (1997) Review
5/10
A gambler tricks his widowed brother-in-law into working as a dance host aboard a cruise ship so that both of them can find wealthy women.
The plot is a device. The film exists so that Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau can be in scenes together, which by 1997 was the ninth time they’d shared the screen and the last occasion worth watching.
It came out the same year as the second Grumpy Old Men sequel. That tells you what the pair were being used for by then, and this is considerably better than that.
The 5 is accurate and not dismissive. The script is thin, the romantic subplots are perfunctory and the resolution is automatic. What you get is two of the best comic actors of the century working with total ease, and that’s worth more than the material around them.
Why the Pairing Works
They had been doing this since The Fortune Cookie in 1966 and the rhythm is completely internal by now. Matthau pushes, Lemmon panics, Matthau is unrepentant, Lemmon capitulates while continuing to complain.
By this point neither is performing the dynamic, they’re simply in it, and the pleasure is watching two people who don’t have to work at all. The timing isn’t being calculated. It’s become a habit.
It also means the film can be as thin as it likes. Put them in a room with any problem and something watchable happens, because the friction is pre-installed and requires no setup.
The best scenes are the ones with no plot function. Lemmon complaining about the uniform. The argument about who is older. A conversation about their dead wives that turns into a disagreement about a restaurant.
Lemmon is doing the more difficult work. That’s the pattern across their films. Matthau plays a fixed quantity extremely well and Lemmon has to react, and reacting for thirty years to the same stimulus without repeating yourself is the harder assignment.
Matthau was seventy-six and Lemmon seventy-two, and both of them are visibly enjoying the job.
A relationship the audience already understands buys enormous economy, and it’s a luxury film series exploit constantly and novelists rarely do. These two need no establishing scenes because the pattern is known. That means the film can start at speed.
The practical application for series fiction is that the second book shouldn’t re-explain the dynamic. It should assume it and go faster. Most sequels spend their first fifty pages reintroducing a relationship the reader is returning for, which is time spent on something they already have.
The test is to read your opening chapters and mark anything that establishes a relationship the returning reader already knows. Then ask whether a new reader would be lost without it. Usually they wouldn’t, because the relationship demonstrates itself in the first argument, and you can cut the introduction and let the scene do it.
The Ship as a Marketplace
The premise is honest about what a cruise is for these characters. A closed environment full of wealthy widows, a fixed duration, and a role that grants a penniless man access to them.
The dance host job is real and the film is accurate about it. Cruise lines employed men to partner unaccompanied women, paid them little or nothing, provided the passage, and forbade any personal involvement.
The rules are the plot. Charlie is there to find a rich woman and the terms of his employment prohibit exactly that. That’s a genuine constraint and the only real structural idea in the film.
Brent Spiner is very funny as the cruise director, playing a small tyrant with a clipboard, a rehearsed patter and a real capacity to have both of them put off at the next port. He gets the best material.
The economics are also stated. The men are unpaid, dependent on tips and goodwill, and entirely disposable, which puts them structurally closer to the staff downstairs than to the guests they’re dancing with.
That’s a more interesting situation than the film pursues, and Dyan Cannon and Gloria DeHaven are both given less than they could have done with.
Lemmon Was the Serious One
A run of late comedies has softened Jack Lemmon’s reputation and it’s worth going back to what he could do.
The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The China Syndrome, Save the Tiger, Glengarry Glen Ross. He played alcoholism, professional collapse and terminal humiliation, and he was better at desperation than almost anybody of his generation.
Days of Wine and Roses in particular is one of the hardest performances in American film, and he made it two years before he first worked with Matthau.
That range is why the comic work lands. When Lemmon panics in a comedy, the panic is real, because he’d the equipment to play it for real and simply chose to pitch it for laughs.
His Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross came five years before this. That means the man doing a broad dance-host comedy had recently given one of the great screen portrayals of failure.
He and Matthau appear in that film too, though not in a scene together, which is one of the odder facts in either career.
The End of the Partnership
Matthau died in 2000 and Lemmon a year later, in June 2001, and the two of them were friends for thirty-five years.
This was their last real collaboration. There was one more, The Odd Couple II, released the following year, which isn’t good and which both of them were candid about.
There’s something in this film, unintentionally, about two old men being told they’ve aged out of usefulness and turning up anyway. Charlie and Herb are hired for a job nobody respects, are treated as staff, and are largely invisible to the passengers.
The film doesn’t pursue it and there’s a better version that does. The premise contains a real subject. That’s what happens to men whose value was social and whose social world has moved on.
What exists instead is pleasant, and pleasant from those two is still a good ninety minutes.
Lemmon spoke at Matthau’s funeral. That’s not film criticism, and it’s the context in which the final films are worth watching.
The Late Career Comedy Problem
There’s a category of film this belongs to and it’s worth naming, because a lot of good actors end up in it.
Two established performers, a thin premise, a modest budget, a warm resolution, and a marketing campaign built entirely on the pleasure of seeing them together again. Grumpy Old Men, Space Cowboys, Last Vegas, The Bucket List, Going in Style.
They exist because the audience relationship is the asset. Nobody buys a ticket for the plot of Out to Sea. They buy it to spend ninety minutes with two men they’ve liked for thirty years, and the studio knows the plot only has to be inoffensive.
That’s not cynical and it produces watchable films. What it doesn’t produce is anything the performers will be remembered for, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable: the last decade of a great career is frequently the decade with the most output and the least worth keeping.
Matthau made fourteen films after his seventieth birthday. Lemmon made twelve. Between them there’s Glengarry Glen Ross, JFK, Short Cuts and a great deal of this.
The films are pleasant, the audience got what it wanted, and there’s no villain in the arrangement. That’s why it keeps happening.
An established relationship with an audience is a genuine asset and it can be spent well or badly, and the distinction is worth thinking about before you have one. Readers who have followed you through several books will read the next one for the company. That means the material has to carry less weight to be commercially viable.
That’s precisely the danger. Reduced pressure produces reduced work, and the audience will accept it for a while and then quietly stop. What kills a long career is rarely a failure; it’s a run of adequate books published because they were sufficient instead of because they were necessary.
The test is to ask whether the book you’re about to write would find readers if it had somebody else’s name on it. If the answer is no, you’re spending the relationship instead of building it, and the arithmetic on that is finite. Write the one that would work as a debut.
Should you watch Out to Sea?
For the leads, and only for the leads. The script is thin, the resolution is automatic and the romantic material is filler. Two of the best comic actors of the century working at total ease is worth ninety minutes, and if you want to see what they could do, watch The Fortune Cookie or The Odd Couple instead.
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