I went to college for about five years. It was a special school, I believe it was called community college. But I got my share of the four-year college experience, too. Sometimes I'd visit friends of friends up in Bellingham. Don't get me wrong, I think education is a valuable thing, but the way the college types socialized wasn't really for me.
SON IN LAW opens at a high school graduation in South Dakota, where the principal tells the seniors of Lincoln High that they started out as caterpillars in a cocoon of stability, that he can almost hear their cocoons opening, and that he sees monarch butterflies. Valedictorian Rebecca Warner follows with a speech about change. It happens "whether we want it or not," she says, before asking her classmates if they're ready for it. "I think so," she answers herself. Her classmates respond with a raspberry and a snore. It's a parade of clichés and platitudes, and I've heard better speeches, even from teenagers. Rebecca has three months to find out whether she meant any of it. That night, her father, Walter, tries to prepare her for California. "The boys are different than they are here," he says, and after a few false starts, "the lifestyle's a lot faster." She asks if he's trying to tell her not to have sex. After a two-day drive, the Warners arrive at the dorm, where Walter goes looking for a screwdriver to open Rebecca's trunk. The guy he finds says he's all out of vodka, asks whether Walter's daughter is hot, and promises to keep "a special eye on her." Then he introduces himself as Crawl, the resident advisor. Walter tells Connie he won't have Rebecca living across the hall from "that thing." Rebecca told her classmates she was ready for change. Her father, it turns out, is not.
My first idea of what a resident advisor was came from SAVED BY THE BELL: THE COLLEGE YEARS, where the guy running the dorm looked way too old to be a student. Upon further investigation, he was a resident director, a staff position, so the show had an excuse. Crawl doesn't. When Rebecca announces she's leaving school, he asks for five minutes and shows her a photo of himself freshman year, a nerd named Fred. "I tossed the spectacles," he says. "Grew the do, guzzled some brew." She asks how long he's been there. Six years, he says, and he's "majored in almost everything." He doesn't know what he wants to be yet, but right now he's having fun. Then, unexpectedly, he makes a good point: how can she try anything new if she hasn't left campus? Within a few minutes she's been fitted with what Crawl calls "weasel wear" and has a tattoo. It's a butterfly, which is how the principal's speech pays off. The Weasel is Pauly Shore's stage persona, and the movie doesn't bother hiding it. Crawl's own background sounds like a tall tale. His mother is a pit boss in Las Vegas on her fourth marriage, to a man who sells catheters and bedpans to hospitals. What I didn't know when I first saw the movie was that Shore's actual upbringing was even stranger. His parents, Sammy and Mitzi Shore, co-founded The Comedy Store. Shore has said he never planned to attend college, which makes him an odd choice to play a student who won't leave.
Rebecca comes home for Thanksgiving with Crawl, whom she introduces as a neighbor who had nowhere else to go. Travis is waiting for her. About 35 minutes in, I could already tell I didn't like him. What kind of loser wears a letterman's jacket after graduating high school? The movie explains the problem in its opening, when Rebecca lays out the plan: she'll go to school, he'll work at the co-op, and they'll see each other every vacation until she's done. Travis isn't pursuing his own life. He's waiting for hers to finish. His first attempt at a proposal ends when Rebecca claims to be dizzy, and she tells Crawl she's too young to settle down but doesn't want to hurt him. So Travis tries again that night, in front of a room full of guests, announcing that he and Rebecca have been "courting for almost five years." She graduated high school three months ago, so that puts the start of their courtship somewhere around seventh grade. When he finally asks, Rebecca tells Crawl to do something. Crawl stands up and says Travis is "too late," because a couple of weeks ago at school he asked Rebecca to marry him, and she said yes. She didn't want to hurt Travis, so she had Crawl tell the whole room he'd been replaced.
One thing you can say about Crawl is that he has an open mind. He kisses the ground when he arrives, greets the fields like a surf break ("Rippin' the fields! Gettin' barreled! Pipeline!"), and tells the Warners he's never been anywhere so pure. After one morning of farming, he has destroyed a fence, lost half the chickens, and messed up the tractor, which Walter puts at close to $1,000. Walter reminds him that he doesn't have a job. "Well, yes, I do," Crawl says. "I'm a farmer." It's almost a movie version of CLARKSON'S FARM, with Theo as the farmhand who knows how the morning will go. Underneath all its stupidity, YOU, ME AND DUPREE is about keeping your essence, and SON IN LAW works much the same way. Crawl doesn't have to become somebody else to win over the Warners. They learn to appreciate him as he is. He gives Connie the same five-minute pitch he gave Rebecca, and that night he's telling her daughter that her parents are getting busy. You expect the movie to turn into WHAT ABOUT BOB, where the houseguest charms the family and the host comes apart. Walter starts down that road. He tells Crawl he stinks "to high heaven" and picks a fight with his whole family at the table, and Crawl announces he's leaving. Then Walter says "nobody's goin' anywhere," the family asks Crawl to stay, and the movie never goes there again.
Lane Smith is the perfect dad for this movie. He played the district attorney in MY COUSIN VINNY, and later that year he started as Perry White on LOIS & CLARK, so he knows how to play an exasperated man in charge of people who won't listen. Walter's father, played by Mason Adams, had been the managing editor on LOU GRANT, which means this farm family has more newsroom experience than you'd expect. Walter can barely remember Crawl's name. He tries "Crotch" and "Cramp" before he asks what kind of name that is anyway. On the morning of the fishing trip, Zack is playing a fishing game on his Game Boy. Walter offers to take him along, and Zack says, "I don't feel like it." So Crawl goes instead, and Walter's father comes too. Walter Sr. spends the trip picking at his son's sidearm casting and complaining that every time he tries to help, Walter turns on him "like a viper in the grass." Crawl tells Walter he feels sorry for him, then adds that he treats Zack the same way, and that the computer games matter more to Zack than Walter realizes. "Who asked you?" Walter says. A moment later his father collapses, and Crawl attempts CPR, including mouth-to-mouth. "If it's between my dyin' or him kissin' me," Walter Sr. says, "I'd rather die." Adams doesn't get many lines, but they all land. Crawl's observation about Walter and Zack is perhaps the sharpest in the movie, and he makes it while holding his fishing rod upside down.
Crawl is a little naive, but he should see Travis coming from a mile away. The night after Crawl tells a room full of guests that Travis has been replaced, Travis apologizes and offers to throw him a bachelor party. "I'd really like that a lot, Travis," Crawl says, and he hugs him. "What a splendid person." Then Travis asks Tracy for a favor, and she tells him she'll wait up for him. She's clearly into Travis, but he's still trying to get Rebecca back, and he has no objection to using Tracy to do it. The party is at a bar where everybody is drinking, although most of these people seem barely out of high school. Rebecca had a beer in front of her at the mud-wrestling bar, too. The movie doesn't explain, so I'll assume fake IDs were a thing. The next morning, Crawl wakes up in a barn with Tracy, remembering only karaoke, and Rebecca walks in on them and calls off the wedding. The truth surfaces at Thanksgiving dinner, when Tracy produces a bottle of pills and notes that someone awfully big must have been driving her car. Theo admits he and Travis put the two of them in the barn, and he calls it a joke. I was suspicious of Travis the whole time, but I expected more from Theo. Walter fires him, Crawl punches Travis, and Connie invites Tracy to stay for dinner. A plot to drug two people and leave them in a barn gets treated as a prank that went too far, and everyone moves on with their lives. Even a split-second shot of Travis behind bars would have helped.
Because the story is set on a farm, you mostly forget what year it is until Zack pulls out his Game Boy, and that's not such a bad thing. Other reminders include the Spin Doctors and roller blades. It's funny that I brought up SAVED BY THE BELL: THE COLLEGE YEARS earlier, because Tiffani-Amber Thiessen is in this. It was her film debut, and she was still playing Kelly Kapowski on TV. Between her, Patrick Renna, and Pauly Shore, the cast is practically a 1993 time capsule. Renna played Ham in THE SANDLOT that same year. The movie made $36.4 million in the U.S. on an $8 million budget. Disney had fought New Line to get Shore for it, and MTV promoted it with a contest to marry him in Las Vegas that drew more than 25,000 entries, although no marriage certificates were signed. That seems about right for a movie built on a fake engagement.
Nobody says the title until the last scene. At Thanksgiving dinner, Walter asks his "future son-in-law" to carve the turkey, and Rebecca stops him to explain that she and Crawl were never sure about the wedding date, so they're putting things on hold. "No use rushing into these things," Walter says, and dinner starts with his invitation to "munch on some grindage." It's a nice ending for a family that spent most of the movie arguing, and it works because Lane Smith and Mason Adams bring such warmth to the material, while Pauly Shore never stops being Crawl. The movie closes on a freeze-frame of the happy family, with "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" playing, as though nothing particularly troubling has happened. For all its stupidity, SON IN LAW is still mostly a sweet comedy.
Final Verdict: 67 out of 100
