<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1IsSkD_0vxdUwvK00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1IsSkD_0vxdUwvK00" width="1766" height="1173" ><figcaption>Saoirse Ronan in 'The Outrun.' Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics</figcaption></figure>Saoirse Ronan is in that rarified class of actor that can make you forget that there’s a screen between her and the viewer. That guards-down acting style, striking as early as “Atonement” (2007), the tragic wartime romance that netted her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod at 13, is the reason to see Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” an addiction drama whose formal finickiness can undermine its emotional power but never the resonance of Ronan’s typically astonishing work.The movie is based on a 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot that I haven’t read. Ronan, a ringer for a young Vanessa Redgrave, plays a version of Liptrot named Rona, and she starts the film at a low: physically forced out of a bar where she gets fall-down drunk, then attacked by a stranger who offers a ride home. Twenty-nine, unemployed, and with an incomplete master’s in biology to her name when we first meet her, Rona’s path to recovery engines “The Outrun.” It’s a winding, unpredictable one, as susceptible to the small triumphs of a sobriety milestone as a relapse and working in tandem with efforts to reconnect with her ecological passions in the remote, gale-wind-prone Scottish archipelago where she grew up. “The Outrun” is, for its first few acts, consistently moving, largely because of Ronan’s palpably anguished work as her character tries piecing together the shards of a life her alcoholism exploded. But Fingscheidt’s nonlinear approach to the narrative, sculpted with assistance from Liptrot, eventually begins to feel less like an effective evocation of the achronological, splintered nature of memory and emotional processing and more like a nuisance. The overlong movie prefers an abrupt segue into a flashback or a flash-forward into the future to lingering too long in a new success or setback, the timeline clarified mostly by the different shades of tasteful pastel Rona variously dyes her straw-blonde hair. Still, I couldn’t help but admire how the “The Outrun” refuses to whittle its personal narrative into something palatable or satisfying. Cropping up in many an addiction movie, that storytelling instinct not only can trivialize someone’s pain into something “entertaining” but also overly simplify what it can take for someone to achieve sobriety, whether in the short- or long-term. “The Outrun”’s messiness feels worth embracing. <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2qAkYK_0vxdUwvK00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2qAkYK_0vxdUwvK00" width="1924" height="1077" ><figcaption>Jonathan Cohen in 'Daaaaaalí.' Courtesy of Music Box Films</figcaption></figure>I’m glad Quentin Dupieux’s “Daaaaaalí!” values chaos as much as its eponymous subject. Five actors — Gilles Lellouche, Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Pio Marmaï, and Didier Flamand — play the curly-mustached Spanish surrealist, sometimes taking turns during the same scene à la Luis Buñuel. A rather kaleidoscopic approach to narrative is favored in place of a conventionally forward-moving one. Mundane settings — long hotel hallways, a beach’s shores — might abruptly transform into venues where time and space collapse, just like they might be in one of Salvador Dalí’s entrancingly arcane paintings. I don’t think I’d want a different approach for an artist as notoriously intractable as Dalí. Yet in its quest to mirror his playful evasiveness, “Daaaaaalí!,” which isn’t quite a biopic, curses itself to ultimately feel a little vacant. It’s full of ticklish comedy and uniformly amusing performances from its quintet of Dalís, but it also doesn’t have much to actually say about him or the reason why its plot is put into motion in the first place: because an in-over-her-head journalist (Anaïs Demoustier), amid a career pivot after four dissatisfying years as a pharmacist, wants to make a documentary about the artist. Her movie-length difficulties pinning down her fickle subject functions decently enough as a commentary on the artistic challenge of trying to say something new about an iconic, outsized subject as a filmmaker. But pretty much all she does is flounder — not dissimilarly from this movie whose flashiness only gets it so far.</div></body>

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‘The Outrun’ and ‘Daaaaaalí’ Are Kaleidoscopic Character Studies

Saoirse Ronan is in that rarified class of actor that can make you forget that there’s a screen between her and the viewer. That guards-down acting style, striking as early as “Atonement” (2007), the tragic wartime romance that netted her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod at 13, is the reason to see Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” an addiction drama whose formal finickiness can undermine its emotional power but never the resonance of Ronan’s typically astonishing work.

‘The Outrun’ and ‘Daaaaaalí’ Are Kaleidoscopic Character Studies

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