“Pivot” feels like too small a word for director Amber Sealey’s decision to follow 2021’s “No Man of God” — an unsettling chamber piece about the relationship between serial killer Ted Bundy and the FBI agent who interrogated him on death row — with “Out of My Mind,” a sweet, fun, and meaningfully empathetic Disney Plus movie about a 12-year-old girl with cerebral palsy.
Range isn’t a particularly valuable metric by which to judge a filmmaker (artists should be free to pursue the subjects that move them, however wide or narrow that spectrum might be), but it’s hard to imagine David Fincher following “Mindhunter” with a heartfelt new twist on “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
Anyway, I’m gonna stick with “pivot” because that’s probably the word this movie’s “Friends”-obsessed heroine would like me to use. Ditto the actress who brings her to life. The character is called Melody, she’s played to perfection by rookie actress Phoebe-Rae Taylor (named after Phoebe Buffay), and while she’s never been able to use her own voice, she likes to imagine that it would sound exactly like Jennifer Aniston.
“Out of Her Mind” grants Melody that wish from the moment it starts; if Aniston’s storybook intonations are a bit too delicate to feel like they’re coming from a tweenager’s brain, that cognitive dissonance sets the right tone for a movie in which Melody — along with her parents, teachers, neighbors, and peers — will all come to learn that what she sounds like is less important than what she has to say. Or at least that it could be if people actually took the time to listen to her.
Set at the height of mall culture in 2002, and adapted from the Sharon M. Draper novel of the same name that was published eight years later, “Out of My Mind” almost exclusively sees the world from Melody’s point of view, and Daniel Stiepleman’s formulaic but perceptive script makes it clear that she understands it far better than even her own parents might think — not only because her neurological condition hasn’t affected her mental acuity, but also because Melody is a bright and hyper-observant young person who’s denied the chance to participate in so many parts of her life.
For one thing, she recognizes that her parents both love her in separate, conflicting, and equally myopic ways; that her overprotective mom Diane (a touchingly frayed Rosemarie Dewitt) wants to keep her feelings safe at all costs, while her indomitable dad (a wrenchingly determined Luke Kirby) won’t hesitate to humiliate his daughter in front of anyone who dares to disrespect her. For another, Melody understands that she’ll probably never kiss a boy or share a comically large Manhattan apartment with five quasi-employed white roommates. If she accepts her reality with a grace that most able-bodied people could never begin to imagine for ourselves (a grace that Taylor, who has CP herself, brings to even her character’s most frustrated moments), she also dreams of being an astronaut, and clings to the last happy vestiges of childhood with the foresight of someone who knows that she’ll be infantilized for the rest of her life. She’s eager to grow up, but she’s nervous about what that will mean.
In that sense — and several others — Melody is a lot like any other 12-year-old kid, and this movie about a non-verbal girl speaks to the universal frustrations of her age group with a specificity that so many other coming-of-age stories don’t have the words to describe. It helps that Melody is grateful for the chance to even have some of those frustrations in the first place, an opportunity that only avails itself to her when a kind-hearted PhD candidate named Dr. Katherine Post (“Insecure” actress Courtney Taylor) raptures her out of her special ed. classroom — a trailer outside the main school — and into a “regular” sixth grade class. That’s where Melody learns about the joy of making friends… and the agony of being rejected by them.
On the other hand, Melody already knows all about the pain of being ignored by adults who think that kids don’t have anything to say, which leaves her more than a little unimpressed with her new teacher’s curriculum. An award-winning educator who radiates enough “cool but cringey” teacher energy to power a whole school district, Mr. Dimming (the great Michael Chernus) is a tricky character for a movie this straightforward to navigate, as his big-hearted enthusiasm doesn’t extend to his most eager student. He’s coded as a “good” person, but he’s so frustrated by the disruption of having a kid with CP in his class that he lets out an exasperated sigh every time Melody tries to participate. His heart is in the right place (more or less), but he’s so deeply internalized his dehumanizing bias against people with disabilities that he assumes his brightest student is his biggest waste of time — a cruel misapprehension that will have some unfortunate consequences when Melody tries out for Mr. Dimming’s quiz team.
More nuanced than you’d expect from a teacher in a Disney+ Original, if maybe a hair more exaggerated than he should be in a movie that so explicitly resists talking down to its characters or their audience, Mr. Dimming personifies all of the “nice” people who preach about civility even as they reliably prioritize their own convenience. The school principal is an even colder representation of that group, as she fears that Melody’s success might inspire a budget-draining rush of other students like her presents a different hurdle.
Melody is absent from that unexpected conversation, but it typifies how diligently “Out of My Mind” threads the needle between Disneyfied plotting and grown-up concerns, as this family friendly movie never forgets that creating a better world for kids with CP is a much bigger and more inclusive project than just convincing their peers not to bully them, a point it triple underlines by Judith Light’s supporting performance as Melody’s kooky, super-involved next-door neighbor. (All of these things make it all the more worth noting that “Out of My Mind” was one of the last things produced by Participant Media, whose long history of socially conscious storytelling didn’t save it from being obliviated by the same free markets that will supposedly afford us a better America.)
Melody tries to take her teacher’s cruelty in stride, but the Mr. Dimmings of the world are her greatest obstacle, and getting an Augmented and Alternative Communication device in the middle of this story — like the one that allowed Stephen Hawking to speak — isn’t quite the magic bullet that she may have wanted. Still, it offers Kirby a beautiful little moment that will make parents sob uncontrollably, and it grants Melody the ability to say words, where before she could only point to the vocabulary sheet on her wheelchair.
In doing so, it invites Taylor to incorporate a new tool into a performance that was already fiercely expressive on its own. Sealey’s supreme faith in the young actress creates a palpable gulf between the depth of Melody’s feelings and the succinctness with which she’s forced to communicate them (the Aniston voiceover is too infrequent to impact either part of that equation), and even the sweatiest contrivances of its third act can’t dilute the soft power of a film that so earnestly — but honestly, and with a minimum amount of treacle — dives headfirst into that divide.
The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.
Grade: B
“Out of My Mind” will be available to stream on Disney+ starting Friday, November 22.
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