The Outrun

Year 18, Day 166 - 6/15/26 - Movie #5,346 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #7

BEFORE: Another day off - so I should be able to post pretty quickly on this one, then I've got some time to either go through the list of movies that are new to streaming in June, or I can quick-scan through a couple of docs to see if I can add them to the Doc Block. With luck, maybe I can start re-alphabetizing my DVDs, but that's really a process that takes a full day, so I think I might have to put that off until Wednesday or Thursday. Jeez, the month is half over already and it feels like it just started, doesn't it? It's no wonder I don't have time for other things in my life besides movies and work, and the fact that I need to sleep all morning now if I can. 

Saoirse Ronan carries over from "How I Live Now". 

THE PLOT: After living life on the edge in London, Rona attempts to come to terms with her troubled past. Hoping to heal, she returns to the beauty of Scotland's Orkney Islands where she grew up. 

AFTER: This film is clearly designed to be the middle film in a chain of three that star Saoirse Ronan, because it links to almost nothing else on my list - so I'm really hiding it here, just to burn it off. Yesterday's film and tomorrow's film just have WAY more linking opportunities, tomorrow's film could get me to Father's Day weekend straight-away, but that's too quick, as it turns out. I had to find three more films to insert into the chain just to delay things a bit, we don't want to get there too fast after all. 

This is one of those films where the story is kind of fragmented, with the scenes out of order - yeah, I usually hate films that use this format because it's a lot of work as an audience member if I have to not only keep track of what's happening, but WHEN it's happening. Ideally no matter what order they show the scenes in, it should all come together in my brain, but if time is not a constant and we go jumping around all over through this person's life, it can be hard to sort it all out - and I believe that filmmakers only do this when they've put the film together in the normal narrative order and realized how boring it all turned out to be. I think maybe when the story got fragmented, that's meant to be symbolic somehow of how her life is in pieces, and she's trying to put it back together? 

Question - because I know that for films that start in the beginning of a story and end at the end, sometimes they shoot the film in order, but more often they do not. For reasons of location availability, weather, the availability of the actors and also convenience, most films are shot OUT of order, I mean once in a while you find one that tries to evoke reality or get the proper emotion out of its actors by shooting in order, but I think that's a rarity. So when the film is designed to be arranged like this, jumping around liberally through different time periods, my question is, do they shoot the film in narrative order and then mix it up, or does it just not matter, even during the shooting process?  Either way, I think the director and the crew need to be super organized if they don't want to miss something, unless they're just hoping that it all comes together somehow in the editing process. 

The key, I think, to figuring out what goes where is her changing hair color - it's an easy cheat, not only toward figuring out WHEN each scene is taking place, but also what point she's in during her journey toward recovery. WAY too often in movies I think this is used as a crutch, when they want to show that a woman has transformed, they just have her color her hair or cut her hair real short - oh, she's a changed person now! Umm, no, she's the same person with a different hair color, if you want to prove to me that she has changed, you need to do that in a more effective fashion. Consider that if the story could tell me in some other way that someone is different now, then they wouldn't NEED to change the color of her hair. 

When we do put the story back together in our heads, like if we were to think of her story from past to present, you know, the way that most people really live their lives, in a straightforward narrative way, we learn that Rona was born, which coincided with her dad having some kind of health issue, and then she was a little girl for a time, she moved to London and studied biology, became a grad student but also she did a lot of clubbing and met this guy, Daynin. Being on the club scene, however, led to excessive drinking and becoming an alcoholic, and this led to a series of accidents and incidents, after which Daynin broke up with her. One night she got into some stranger's car because he claimed to know where Daynin was and he was going to take her there, only he attacked her and she ended up in the hospital. This led to her entering rehab and completing a 90-day sober program before deciding to return home to the Orkney Islands. 

Once she settles in she begins a job for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and is tasked with tracking a rare bird called a corn crake. This involves spending the night driving slowly through farmland in a grid-like fashion, listening for the call of the corn crake - this is apparently a real bird and a real job if you want to know how many corn crakes there are left in the world. If you don't even hear the call of one, the answer might be zero. At some point after this, she moves to the even more remote Papa Westray island and becomes part of their tiny and tight-knit community and during the winter she develops an interest in the seaweed industry, so OK, maybe that's her calling? At least it's another avenue to pursue that makes use of her college degree. 

That tiny island is home to the annual Gyro Festival - a low-rent version of "Burning Man" during which artists come from all over the place to celebrate, and first I have to question if this is really the best place for Rona to be if she's trying to stay sober, don't they take a lot of psychedelic drugs and party during these sort of things? Great, so she's not drinking any more, but now she's hooked on mushrooms and LSD...

I'm going to just get into the rather complicated relationship Rona has with her father, and then call it t a day. Her dad has some kind of bipolar disorder, so he's got periods of hyperactivity and ambition, and then long periods of depression and spending the day in bed. When he's active he's got these grand plans like profiting from finding ambergris in the ocean, somehow monetizing the caves below the island for geothermal energy, and such. But also at one point he becomes institutionalized and accuses Rona of calling the cops on him and putting him in the mental hospital, only she didn't do that, somebody else in town did. When he is released, he goes back to living in the camper van outside the house, because Rona's mother can't really handle him any more, plus she's so busy with her Bible group that she can't be bothered to try and deal with him. 

This is all based on a memoir of the same name written by Amy Liptrot, so I can't really say this is far-fetched, because it all did happen to someone. Living in London for ten years led to alcoholism, I think we can all see that, and she lost her job, her home and her boyfriend as a result. Moving back to Scotland, counting the birds, getting clean and relatively sane again, and then partying with the artists, who's to say it couldn't happen if it all did?  Maybe not everybody's life and experiences is worthy of becoming a film that screens at Sundance and Edinburgh, but some of us do have these semi-wild lives that are movie-worthy. Hey, Hollywood, I go to a bunch of beer festivals and I've had a bunch of wild experiences in the world of animation production, so, umm, where's my movie? 

Directed by Nora Fingscheidt

Also starring Saskia Reeves (last seen in "Me and Orson Welles"), Stephen Dillane (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Lauren Lyle, Paapa Essiedu (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Izuka Hoyle (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Eilidh Fisher, Naomi Wirthner, Danyal Ismail, Posy Sterling, Nabil Elouahabi (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Jack Rooke, Seamus Dillane, Conrad Williamson, Tony Hamilton-Croft (last seen in "War Machine"), Ammar Younis, Louise McMenemy, Scott Miller, Freya Evans, David Garrick, Aniya Sekkanu, Liam Smith, Jacqui Hirst, Nicola Kilpatrick, Dawn Johnson, Alexandre Afjool, Gillian Dearness, Tim Dodman, Jamie Crew, Isabelle Roux, Kevin Shaw, Kristen Norquoy, Kyle Mackay, Ellis Tait, Sweyn Hunter, Paul Rendall, Linn Johansson, Matthew Coulton, Martin Gray, Paul Kulik, Aidan Smith

RATING: 5 out of 10 readings of the Serenity Prayer at A.A. meetings