No matter the century, Saoirse Ronan is going to dance. When the four-time Academy Award nominee moves to the music in her two films this season, the fabric of a blue-striped dress or a vintage silk black top with a rose print becomes one with the choreography. Despite being set more than 70 years apart, London nightlife scenes in the World War II drama “Blitz” and “The Outrun’s” 21st century tale of alcoholism and recovery each display a 1930s influence.
In “The Outrun,” adapted by director Nora Fingscheidt from Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name, Rona is a fictional version of the author. Charting a decade or so of Rona’s life, Ronan (who also produced the film) has around 80 costume changes, from carefree partying and the subsequent spiral in Hackney to practical outerwear after moving home to the remote Orkney Islands as part of her sobriety journey. In Steve McQueen’s big-budget “Blitz,” Ronan plays resilient single mother Rita, whose 9-year-old son, George, goes missing from an evacuation train to the countryside. Like many other Londoners, Rita kept up appearances during the war.
Here, costume designers Grace Snell and Jacqueline Durran discuss how the locations and turbulence in each story inform the vibrant looks.
For the first “Outrun” fitting, Snell arrived at Ronan’s home with five suitcases of options, including a garment steeped in personal history. “This silk vest I have had for as long as I can remember in my adult life. It was given to me by my auntie,” says Snell. “It was made by my nanny in the ’80s. They’d found a piece of fabric in a jumble sale together. It’s a 1930s piece of fabric.” Snell’s aunt wore it “during her Bananarama phase,” and in the late 2000s the costume designer partied in London nightclubs wearing the same rose top. Next up, Rona.
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1.The look costume designer Grace Snell created for the character’s sobriety journey in nature for “The Outrun.”(Apple)2.Snell chose a vintage tank for Soairse Ronan’s partying days in “The Outrun.”(Apple)
Ahead of nature becoming a lifesaver back home on the Scottish island, florals hold significance in the city. Rona wears the ’30s silk tank when a dreamy summer day morphs into first kisses at a nightclub — before benders and breakups. “I think it was one of our first costumes that Saoirse and I were like, ‘This is it!’” Snell says. It was easy to envision its impact as “The Outrun’s” hair and makeup designer, Kat Morgan, had dyed Ronan’s hair a bold shade for the first fitting. “With the turquoise hair, I thought a monochromatic top would work brilliantly,” Snell says. In the dark nightclub, the top isn’t trying to pull focus: “It’s her face that is illuminated.”
A cozy black hoodie with a white unicorn (coincidentally, Scotland’s national animal) graphic “ties in with the myth and legend elements of the film,” appearing at low points in both locations. “You have a London wardrobe, an Orkney wardrobe, and then a crossover of a few bits that bounce around,” Snell says.
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Snell pulled a coat from her father’s closet that Rona wears back home and the designer borrowed from Orkney residents: “Rona’s wellies were given to us by one of the women on the farm, and I bought her a new pair as a thank-you.” No need to walk around muddy fields for authenticity: “That’s real sheep poo.” “It was important to me that lots of the clothes were lived and worn in; clothes that people have experienced wearing in those environments,” adds Snell. Overalls, oversize knits and a faux fur hat that Snell sourced but didn’t end up using for the Tilda Swinton movie “The Eternal Daughter” are part of Rona’s contrasting rural aesthetic.
Like Rona, Rita experiences bliss on the dance floor in “Blitz.” For this pivotal, joyous moment with boyfriend Marcus (CJ Beckford), before prejudice and then war tear her family apart, Rita’s striped blue frock with a shorter hemline is typical of late ’20s-early ’30s trends: “We copied it from an original, and it was very fitted from the waist over the upper hip, and then it flared so it was good for dancing.”
Rita’s dedication to looking her best in the present, whether at work in the munitions factory or going on a night out wearing a leopard-print coat, is inspired by photographic evidence. “It was almost part of the war effort to keep the front up, to keep your appearance together as much as you could, to keep morale high,” says Durran. “Putting your best foot forward even though it’s the war.”
“Blitz” is Durran’s fourth collaboration with Ronan across 17 years since they first worked together on “Atonement.” The nine-time Oscar nominee (Durran won for “Little Women” and “Anna Karenina”) observes that Ronan “has become one of our greatest movie stars,” and a showstopping “highly tailored, bold jacket” reflects the cultural status. Inspiration from adventurous late-’30s silhouettes makes Rita stand out at the train station in a sea of children ready to evacuate. “I think that’s part of movie storytelling, but I also was very conscious that I didn’t want it to be unbelievable, even though it looks like an extraordinarily big statement,” Durran says.
Costume designer Jacqueline Durran found not everything was drab during the Blitz, red was also “in the fashion ether at the time.”
(Parisa Taghizdeh/Apple)
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Far from all Londoners falling back on dull neutrals, Durran found red was “in the fashion ether at the time”; makeup designer Naomi Donne also goes crimson for Rita’s lipstick. While the diagonal-striped jacket and skirt are custom-built, the contrasting red polka-dot blouse and shoes are vintage. Durran pushed the period-accurate look “a touch” but didn’t want to lean too glam with Rita’s headwear. “We did try some other more classic ’40s hats on,” she says. “Because we were already doing the red jacket, I wanted to play the hat down a bit.” Crochet provided the solution: “I went for a hat that felt like you could make at home.”
Using patterns from the era, “Lots of the headscarves in the factory were also crocheted.” These details show East End women “still express themselves” even in an expected uniform environment. The same applies whether on the bus, sheltering in a tube station or sorting through the rubble. “It was about London and the multiplicity of people and realities that are there,” Durran says. “I always felt that with Rita, or with any of the principals, you were just zooming in on one aspect of life in London at that moment, of which there were millions of versions.”
Depictions of the U.K. capital wildly differ in the Ronan double bill. Yet flashbacks highlight a sartorial connection within the cityscape Rita and Rona inhabit before one leaves the metropolis behind.
Satya Dev’s upcoming heist drama, Zebra, is set for a grand release tomorrow, with the actor expressing high hopes for its success. Kannada star Daali Dhananjaya plays a pivotal role alongside Satya Dev.
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To build anticipation, the makers recently released a sneak peek and hosted a special show for a select audience. The latest update reveals that the film’s runtime has been set at 164 minutes (2 hours and 44 minutes), which may feel a bit lengthy for a heist thriller. It remains to be seen how well the film engages its audience.
The movie also stars Priya Bhavani Shankar, Sathyaraj, Amrutha Iyengar, and others. Produced by OldTown Production and Padmaja Films Private Limited, the film’s music is composed by Ravi Basrur, known for his work on KGF.
My first memory of Ted Danson is of him dancing solo to Frank Sinatra in a pool of light on a pier in the movie “Body Heat,” which is all I remember of “Body Heat.”
It set a tone of gracefulness that continues to inform his performances to this day, in a wide range of soft-spoken modes, from “Cheers” to “Bored to Death” to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where he appears as a version of himself. He mostly plays comedy, because that’s what a likable actor is liable to be asked to do, but he can work against type with the best of them, as he did as a corrupt billionaire in “Damages.”
That Danson, assumed to be an angel, turned out to be a devil in the first season finale of “The Good Place,” was a massive fake-out that depended on subverting our expectations, not only of his character but also of the actor himself. (That the character became a force for good felt almost inevitably on brand.) He works all the time, and yet one greets every new appearance with a sort of grateful excitement, as if he had been away somewhere for years.
The latest Danson series is “A Man on the Inside,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, but it is in most every other respect a classic NBC Thursday night comedy. It comes from Michael Schur, who created “The Good Place” (a classic NBC Thursday night comedy), with which it shares a philosophical bent, playing with questions of mortality and morality and the meaning of life, explicitly but not pedantically. It’s sweet and serious, and as the series goes on, knockabout comedy makes room for poignancy. But it never stops being funny.
Danson plays Charles, a well-to-do retired professor of engineering, who after a year is still mourning his late wife. Without work or friends — a dramatic convenience that will allow him to find both — he has settled into a comfortable rut, amplifying what we’re to understand is a reserved, cerebral nature; he’s fascinated by facts and figures, but less good with people. He has a daughter, Emily (a marvelous Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who lives a couple hours away with husband Joel (“Good Place” vet Eugene Cordero) and three comically unresponsive kids — Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, oddly brilliant doing essentially nothing. Charles and Emily love one another without being exactly close. She’d like her father to get back into the swing of life, to un-retire or find a hobby, instead of merely mailing her articles he’s clipped from a newspaper. The paper newspaper!
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In “A Man on the Inside,” Charles (Ted Danson) has a daughter named Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and three comically unresponsive grandchildren, Nico (Lincoln Lambert, left), Wyatt (Wyatt Yang) and Jace (Deuce Basco).
(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)
It’s in the newspaper that he comes across a classified ad, reading: “Wanted, Investigative Assistant, Male 75-85, Must have phone.” This brings him to the office of Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator whose client (Marc Evan Jackson, also from “The Good Place”) has hired her to look into the theft of his mother’s ruby necklace from her room in a posh San Francisco retirement home. Julie needs a senior citizen to go undercover in that “closed ecosystem” — that is, closed to her — to collect information, identify suspects and report back.
The premise seems improbable, yet the series is based on a 2020 Chilean documentary feature titled “The Mole Agent,” which tells just such a tale. That Charles is, at least to begin with, what Julie calls “the best option in a sea of not very good options,” is of course the point, and the starting point. The bumbling spy is a reliable comic figure, and Charles, masking ill-conceived lies with more ridiculous ones, would seem weird to anyone taking him at face value — if it were any other face than Danson’s.
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At the Pacific View retirement community, Julie poses as Charles’ daughter, and when Emily arrives unexpectedly, he introduces her to the director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), as “my niece … Julie,” adding an extra layer to the farce. (“My brother, um, had a child, and it grew into her,” he’ll say, making a later awkward introduction.) Emily is skeptical of the whole arrangement — “You know, reading a bunch of Sue Grafton novels doesn’t make you a detective,” she tells her father — but it will also, as it bumps along, bring them closer together. It’s that kind of show.
As a person in his late 70s — Danson is 76 — one would say that Charles is a fish only half out of water in this environment; in his erect bearing and chiseled-profile, lead-actor handsomeness, he remains subtly distinct from his peers. Which is not to say that they’re a sedentary crew: Charles finishes his first night drunk — happy hour begins at 3 p.m. — and stoned, and he wakes up in the morning with two slices of pizza stuck to his back. (“Thank God,” he says to Julie, who has roused him from hungover sleep. “I’m starving.”)
The series also stars Margaret Avery as Florence, left, and Sally Struthers as Virginia.
(Netflix)
Sally Struthers, who doesn’t get as many meaty roles as she deserves, is Virginia, flirty and forward. (“You are tall” are her first words to Charles.) Elliott (John Getz) regards Charles as competition. An affecting Susan Ruttan plays Gladys, a gentle, former costume designer, forgetting things. Solitary Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) proves a temperamental match for Charles. Florence (Margaret Avery) tempts him into reading Shakespeare, which goes over his head. (Significantly, he’s assigned the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from “As You Like It,” in which life’s last age is described as “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”) And I was glad to see Veronica Cartwright among the crowd, as well — a minor role, but, still, it’s Veronica Cartwright.
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From the beginning of his learning curve, Charles charges ahead with a mixture of professional determination, childlike glee and scientific precision — finding the atmosphere “rife with secrets, grudges, interpersonal issues.” He compiles thick dossiers on everyone — when not questioning his fitness for the job. But even as he gets the hang of the work, he becomes more interested in the people than the case. He forges bonds and makes friends, which Julie warns him against. “Being a spy means being lonely,” she says, missing the point of the series she’s in.
While it isn’t as rich and strange as “The Good Place,” “A Man on the Inside” is nevertheless a pleasure on most every level, and, as before, Schur wants more than just to make you laugh. To the extent that it’s sentimental, it’s also clear-eyed, genuine and conceptually rigorous.
Many of us will have had the experience of managing older parents, or trying to. Many of us are old ourselves. Death waits offstage here, in plain sight. All these septuagenarian actors are still working, with years of experience and shelves of awards among them, at the top of their game — even if the people they play are not. In a sense, they’re just pretending to be old.
Directed by Amber Sealey. Starring Phoebe-Rae Taylor, Jennifer Aniston, Rosemarie DeWitt, Luke Kirby, Judith Light, Emily Mitchell, Michael Chernus, Courtney Taylor, Catherine McNally, Kate Moyer, Maria Nash, Jeff Roop, Sharron Matthews, Kim Huffman, Ian Ho, Gabriela Francis, Gavin MacIver-Wright, Maya Lee O’Connor, Nicholas Fry, Miley Haik, Lauren Plech, Nylan Parthipan, Pip McCallan, Isaak Bailey, Christian Rose, Cristiano Buchanan, Anabelle Dietl, and Mia Burke.
SYNOPSIS:
Melody Brooks is navigating sixth grade as a nonverbal wheelchair user who has cerebral palsy. With the help of some assistive technology and her devoted allies, Melody shows that what she has to say is more important than how she says it.
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Born with cerebral palsy, Melody Brooks (played by Phoebe-Rae Taylor, also born with that condition and unquestionably a significant key to the authenticity on display) is a nonverbal wheelchair user. She is also knowledgeable with ambitions and has a lot to say, but she is limited to communicating through a board attached to her wheelchair tray (a slight, realistic touch that most films about disability seem to ignore the existence of for some inexplicable reason) containing a chart of basic sentences, thoughts, feelings, and moods for simple expression.
Directed by Amber Sealey (from a screenplay by Daniel Stiepleman and based on the novel by Sharon M. Draper), Out of My Mind mainly works because it understands that giving Melody a Medi-Speak device (an electronic tool that reads off whatever is prompted, while also coming with preprogrammed basic phrases and sentences, read aloud in the usual generic computerized voices) won’t entirely solve the problem if everyone from the school faculty to her friends and immediate family vary in their struggles to listen to those words. The issues raised stem from society and the education system, not the disability itself. That’s not to say electronic voice communicators are useless. A voice is a voice, and her father Chuck’s (Luke Kirby) reaction to hearing her daughter “speak” for the first time in which he lets the waterworks flow is a heartstrings-pulling moment that doesn’t ring false.
However, even he sometimes misses the point and gets so caught up discussing what’s best for Melody with his wife, Diane (Rosemarie DeWitt), that they both end up ignoring her in the heat of the moment. He does happen to be the more forward-minded of the parents, as fearless as his daughter is about enrolling into a standard 6th-grade class rather than overachieving in special education. If expectations are already met, why not raise the bar? That alone feels like a mantra most disabled people already live by, consistently feeling the need to prove themselves to able-bodied people who can’t even be bothered to learn that they don’t have to talk to someone in a wheelchair with an awkwardly kind, pitiful tone. Nevertheless, Diane is the helicopter parent raising justifiable concerns over ostracism and bullying.
As for the speaking device, what Melody chooses to say first is equally moving, as it encapsulates and sums up the frustrations and misunderstandings she has felt, even from her family, her whole life. It’s also important to point out that the film isn’t vilifying the parents; caring for a disabled child is tricky, will wear anyone down, and inadvertently cause those miscommunications, or lack thereof. Despite one or two powerful scenes of them standing up for Melody, whether it be from an ablest school system (including a teacher played by Michael Chernus who is technically qualified at the job but is immensely punchable when it comes to his ableism and treating Melody’s classroom presence as a distraction and nuisance), the film primarily sticks with her perspective, sprinkling in some inner thoughts using the voice of Jennifer Aniston.
It’s a device used sparingly, thankfully not overdone. As for why Jennifer Aniston, Melody loves watching Friends, but one is eager to know if that’s also a choice from the book or one encouraged by Phoebe-Rae Taylor. From little details such as classroom desks placed too close together for wheelchairs to fit through the aisles, classmates feeling an awkward pressure of losing “cool” status if they are caught giving friendship a chance with Melody, and grossed-out glances her way as eating messier foods becomes, well, messy to her face, the film understands the pitfalls of public and social disabled life. Again, maybe that’s already in the novel or screenplay, but it can’t be overstated enough that when filmmakers cast disabled actors, it comes with extra layers of authenticity and insight.
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Remember that this is still a Disney+ production, so the material has a sanitized, sentimental feel while broadly playing every narrative beat. Once a nationwide quiz competition comes into play, the narrative’s focus shifts there, perhaps too much, even if it still explores Melody’s othering by some of her peers and that enraging teacher. Bluntly put, it all becomes too plot-focused and even contrived. Feel-good songs also repeatedly pop up to remind viewers that the material will never get too challenging. However, a film is sometimes so well-meaning and educationally beneficial that such saccharine material is worth overlooking. Out of My Mind offsets that with a huge heart and a dignified, optimistic, touching performance from Phoebe-Rae Taylor.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
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