RONAN CREATES GRITTY PORTRAIT OF SOBRIETY
The gritty reality of a sober alcoholic comes to life on screen with the picture perfect performance of Saoirse Ronan in the film, The Outrun (2024).
Director Nora Fingscheidt creates short scenes that shift frequently in tone, atmosphere and content to make for a compelling narrative along a 1 hr 58 m runtime.
Two narratives in the backstory merge with the main narrative counting the days forward of sobriety.
Ronan becomes the roaring uncontrollable binge alcoholic in one backstory narrative and the highly focused task oriented research biologist in another backstory narrative. The scenes shift back and forth from the days of sobriety on the Scottish Orkney Island Coast to the too much to drink days in London Town.
The film score is merged with the natural sound of the stormy ocean coast where the film’s protagonist, Rona, retreats to after a successfully completing a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.
Fingscheidt at times creates visual chaos to depict the long hard road to recovery on which Rona has embarked. The plot reversal scenes are shown as a visual montage just when Rona appears to have broken through the most difficult days and begun to turn her world around.
Ronan creates a varied, gritty performance as the character shows the many faces of a sober alcoholic, from the black out drunk to the hours and hours of delirium tremens.
When Rona is all clear, the biologist falls in love with the seaweed she has been living with along the sea shoreline of the remote island.
The Outrun lacks a bit of the grand cinematic sweep of a feature film, and instead, resembles more the lonely internal struggle Rona must go through before returning to her life in London.
The detailed creativity of the storyboards does transfer well on film with scene sequences being individualized under an interesting intellectual aesthetic that surfaces now and then, such as a synchronicity with the character and the approaching storm.
The script every now and then becomes didactic, showing the boredom the protagonist experiences that drives her to drink and/or urges her from the inside to drink.
Paapa Essiedu provides a supporting character as the live-in boyfriend that can no longer tolerate the drunken rages of Rona that occur too frequently pub hopping in London.
Daynin is not the only part in Rona’s life that becomes dissatisfied. Rona always seems to have a reason to be displeased with other significant people in her emotional support system.
Saskia Reeves plays Annie, Rona’s mum, who Rona resents because she spends too much happy time pleasing Jesus Christ, instead of taking care of her daughter’s needs.
And Rona’s father, is an eccentric bipolar sheep farmer who is less nurturing than his daughter would like.
Ronan does a good job creating distinct parts of her character interacting differently with each of the supporting characters in a kind of Bakhtinian dialogue with the fragmented parts of a dysfunctional life.
The film is based on the memoir by Army Liptrot.
The Outrun is currently streaming on Apple.
CHARACTER OVERCOME BY HISTORICAL WAVES AND MUD
Mary Anning dug about the mud and rocks and ocean waves of the Jurassic marine fossil beds as a young child with her father and brother.
Director Francis Lee dramatizes a short episode in Anning’s life, still mucking about and discovering various skeletons as an adult woman in Old England, but also a time for her when her inner life was much more complicated.
Kate Winslet plays Anning as an introverted scientist lacking a touch in social skills because she has spent too much time with books, drawings and fossils.
Anning also seems scarred by the back story of her difficult life growing up on the coast at Dorset in the 18th Century.
Lee keeps the narrative within a respectful timeframe without resorting to flashbacks or redirects into secondary narratives.
The fossil gardens are used as a narrative device with a slow moving script limited mainly to locations on the seaside and within Anning’s seaside residence.
Lee could have spent more time elsewhere with his camera, but he seems to have stayed in the fossil gardens with the fossils for a reason.
One of the first scenes is of Anning and her mother, Molly, played by Gemma Jones, sitting down for brunch after Mary returns from the beach mud with a fossil.
Molly cracks open a chicken egg with a partially developed chick embryo inside, and then throws it into the wood stove for incineration purposes.
Lee uses a score only sparingly, keeping instead the individual scene dramatizations simple like the simple life along the Atlantic Ocean. The sounds of the cold ocean wind, waves, and rain, contrasted with the crackling burning wood of a fireplace warming the inside of the seaside home, are used instead to fill in the scenes and compel the narrative forward.
Saoirse Ronan joins the cast as Charlotte Murchison. Murchison’s back story is provided as an example of relationships and marriage at a time when life was much more challenging, unequal and often unfair to women.
Ronan performs seaside melancholia. Ronan has been nominated for Oscars four times for performances in Little Women (2019), Lady Bird (2017), Brooklyn (2015) and Atonement (2007). Lee makes one intertextual reference to Lady Bird.
Winslet has seven nominations, including one win for her performance in The Reader (2009). Winslet of course shot to super stardom in the James Cameron blockbuster, Titanic (1997), co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kathy Bates.
The acting fits well with the script, while Winslet and Ronan are cast well together.
Lee moves the film as if himself combing the sand, moving slow with intermittent expressions of solitude, such as close ups on seaside creatures, a bird, a crab and a beetle.
The genre is more of a period piece than a costume genre, although Lee shows how women were typecast by their clothes, with the daily dresses not suitable for mucking about digging for fossils. Even Anning, who seems to work full time in the marine fossil beds, does not dare to dawn trousers, etc.
Winslet and Ronan also explore the meaning of relationships, with marriage seeming a bit too constraining, and friendships between women still too formal.
Anning is portrayed as disassociated from the community and her neighbours, but the reason for that unfriendliness is not revealed to the audience.
Murchison’s daily presence with Anning begins to light up her inner soul, with flickers of emotions showing in her eyes beginning with the moment of their first sight of each other in Anning’s tourist shop. As Anning would say in another context, ‘there might be something there or there might be nothing there.
Murchison needs a doctor after developing a fever from an impromptu swim in the frigid waters off the Atlantic. Dr. Lieberson, played by Alec Secareanu, recommends bed rest. And the good doctor persuades Anning to provide Murchison with daily care.
As a result, Anning and Murchison gradually form a bond that leads to a sexual relationship. Lee has been criticized for over dramatizing the script as the historical record does not indicate that Anning was a lesbian. Unfortunately, Lee has manipulated Anning’s life story for the purpose of commercialization in theatres and streaming.
And so, Lee has missed an opportunity here, and he instead seems to have dialed everything down a bit too much to suit his fossilized narrative device.
STAGE TO COMPELLING COSTUME DRAMA ABOUT DYNASTIC POWER
Mary Stuart returns from France to reclaim the Crown in Scotland that was held by her regent in Mary, Queen of Scots (2018).
Director Josie Rourke makes her feature film debut with the biopic period piece set in 1561.
Rourke weaves the leading narrative of Mary, Queen of Scots, played by Saoirse Ronan, with the supporting narrative of Elizabeth I of England, played by Margot Robbie.
The intertwined narratives gradually unravel when Mary and Elizabeth finally meet near the end of the film.
Rourke’s stagework experience as the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse shows through in the film with the script outlining the intrigue of royal courts and the machinations of powerful real life characters ever plotting to ruin the careers of more moral people.
The strong supporting role played by Robbie is reflective of her Oscar nomination for the leading role as American Olympic figure skater, Tonya Harding. Harding becomes embroiled in a conspiracy to injure her nearest rival, US figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, prior to the commencement of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympic Games in I,Tonya (2017).
Robbie is fitted with a prosthetic nose for her supporting role as Elizabeth. Robbie also goes through several realistic make up transformations over a number of interspersed scenes as she portrays the English Queen recovering from a severe bought of smallpox that scars her face.
Make-up artist Jenny Shicore and costume designer Alexandra Byrne collaborate again after having worked on the period films, Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007).
Shicore won an Oscar for the make-up work in Elizabeth. Shicore also worked on The Young Victoria (2009), My Week with Marilyn (2011) and Macbeth (2015).
Byrne won an Oscar for the costume work in Elizabeth. Byrne’s other costume work includes Avengers(2012), Doctor Strange (2016) and Mowgli (2018).
Rourke instills further realism by lighting the sets in a manner that portrays the ambience of castles as they would have been at the time before electricity, with candles and fire lighting the floor level, and natural light streaming down into the rooms from overhead windows.
The time issues are dealt with except at the end of the intertwined narratives when the film time jumps from Mary being placed under guard in England to her eventual execution 18 years later as Rourke completes a wrap around.
The script follows the monarch through the delicate transition in reclaiming her power in Scotland and pressuring Elizabeth for respect and sovereignty.
Elizabeth is without a husband and without a child, and so the Queen of Scotland and her eventual heir would be able to unite the two Crowns, as did eventually occur, with Mary’s son, James, uniting the kingdom.
The film could have included scenes of Mary’s life of confinement to make more of a seamless transition from the time of her abdication in Scotland to the time of her death in England.
Rourke does excel at compelling the narrative forward by alternating scenes between the court of Elizabeth I to that of Mary, Queen of Scots, and also from inside the dark lit castles to the bright stunning vistas of the Scottish Highlands.
The film does lack a bit of suspense. The story line, based on well known biopic material, relies on the not so well known details to compel audiences.
Rourke uses an original score in the background of many scenes, but the music is not synced with the acting nor does the score create suspense, even in the short battle scenes.
As with many period pieces the film slowly focuses on the costumes, make up and hair styles,and of course the acting.
Ronan realistically plays the teenage Queen as she makes mistakes through inexperience,becomes manipulated by the more experienced plotting Lords advising her, and ultimately realizes the path to her downfall all too late.
Ronan has received three Oscar nominations: one for her supporting role in Atonement (2007),at the age of 13, and one for her leading role in Brooklyn (2015) and a third for her leading role in Lady Bird (2017).
Ronan is able to transform from the private school teenage she played in Lady Bird to the determined authoritarian figure in Mary, Queen of Scots.
The talented actor portrays inexperience, authoritarianism, jealousy and vengeance as well as helplessness as the widowed Queen of France becomes the Queen of Scotland and then is eventually deposed to become an outlaw in Scotland and England until her execution.
A similar acting range is performed in Lady Bird, as Ronan realistically portrays a young girl struggling with her new maturity through defiant behavioural outbursts directed toward her parents, her private Catholic school teachers and her boyfriend.
The teenage insecurities growing up in boring Sacramento are shed for the confidence of a monarch with the divine right to rule the beautiful Scotland.
Rourke also develops tolerance issues, including the discriminatory treatment of a bisexual court jester and the gender bias of male Lords determined to dominate the female monarchs.
