The Outrun

Grade: C

I forgot to mention something when I reviewed My Old Ass last week. There’s an amusing running gag about how the lead character’s pre-teen younger brother has a crush on “that Irish actress whose name nobody can pronounce.” I’d planned to say that I knew immediately who they were talking about, I like her too, and I had to look up how to say her name. They are, of course, referring to Saoirse Ronan (pronounced “SUR-shuh”) – from Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and Little Women. She stars here in The Outrun, a movie that made me audibly say “what the hell was that?” when the lights came up at the end. It’s bad. Thank God for Saoirse. It would have been terrible otherwise.

Ronan plays Rona, a destructive alcoholic. After her rock bottom, she returns to her hometown of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, to be in an aimless, dull movie where nothing happens…excuse me, to sort herself out. It jumps back and forth in time, because it would have been a top-heavy narrative if it was linear…excuse me, to fill in some blanks about her past. Ronan looks great, and is one of the best actresses working today. With four Oscar nominations before turning 30, I see her name come up often when the “who will be our next Meryl Streep/Glenn Close?” question gets asked. Unfortunately, not enough takes place, and the forced, optimistic last couple minutes had me wondering so many things. Is she sober? Is she not completely sober, but has finally got it under control? What has she learned? What’s she going to do? Who knows?

There are hints of interesting avenues it could have taken. In the AA meetings, Rona shares that she misses alcohol, when it made her feel good, which was the majority of the time. She doesn’t know if she can be happy sober. As someone who has been off alcohol for 1150 days as of this writing, life has been pretty good since then. However, it sometimes feels like I’ve had a part of me amputated, and I’m just having the best possible one-footed existence I can, while thinking “I still wish I had both feet, though” in the back of my mind. The best sensation alcohol gave me was better than the best I feel sober, and that’s something I still think about. What I’ve just written is more exploration into the subject than we get from The Outrun. Ditto for a subplot about Rona’s father’s bipolar disorder. When something does happen to him, it feels like the screenwriters are just being like “oh yeah, we set this character up with an ailment – we should give you a payoff.” It’s not enough to gesture at themes. They have to amount to something.

Reviews I’ve seen have praised the ending, with some going so far as to say it builds up to a strong conclusion. I wouldn’t call it a great one, even for a hypothetical indie film. It’s a last-ditch effort to put a final cherry on top, but comes across as throwing a blob of paint on a bare, blank canvas. The hosts of my favorite movie criticism podcast loved the last spoken line. They hinted at it without spoiling. I had an idea of what it was in reference to, and turned out to be correct.  The Outrun is boring and pretentious. The next time Ronan appears in a movie with “run” in the title, take that advice.

Grade: C