Contained in the Y2K Costumes and Units of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s ‘Mouse’
The making of Mouse gave some Arkansas mothers a very good reason to have kept their daughters’ prom dresses. Costume designer Meg Grace put out a call on Facebook; in the week before the school-dance sequence was filmed, a member of her team drove around town collecting gowns, filling a van. Altogether, they gathered some 50 dresses worn to proms between 2000 and 2003. “It felt like a time warp,” Grace says of seeing them on the actors.
That flicker of recognition runs through the funny, affecting film from Ghostlight directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson. Set in 2002 in O’Sullivan’s hometown of North Little Rock, Arkansas, Mouse follows Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), a teenager accustomed to living in the shadow of her charismatic best friend, Callie (Chloe Coleman). After Callie’s sudden death, Minnie gravitates toward her friend’s poised mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), and the inviting home she has long preferred to her own.
Their bond grows more complicated, shaped by affection, grief, and that familiar teenage longing to be someone else. Mouse is particularly attuned to how a teenager’s dissatisfaction can attach itself to almost anything: imperfect skin, house clutter, a mother’s manner of speaking. The clothes and interiors do more than evoke an era; they reveal how Minnie sees herself and the life she wishes were hers.
O’Sullivan wanted the period embedded in her characters’
O’Sullivan wanted the period embedded in her characters’ lives rather than presented as a cartoon version of the early 2000s. That required thinking about how trends actually reached teenagers there. “Arkansas wouldn’t be on the cutting edge of fashion in 2002,” she observes. Grace, who grew up in Arkansas around the same time, recalls the stores available to her: JCPenney, Sears, Walmart, Big Lots, Kmart.
“We might have all wanted to look like what we saw on TV, but what did you actually have access to?” she asks. You might wait until Christmas to ask for a shirt you’d coveted for six months. “That might be the one thing in your closet that’s really stylish, and then you make it work with everything else.”
For research, Grace consulted O’Sullivan’s yearbooks and pressed friends to unearth old photographs, including shots from their first digital cameras.
“None of us knew how to put an outfit together,” she says, smiling. The challenge was to create looks that appeared as though a teenager had put them together with limited options and a still-developing sense of style. Much of the wardrobe came from Arkansas estate sales and secondhand shops. Among the more discerning finds were the cargo capris, a once-ubiquitous garment largely overlooked by today’s Y2K revival.
O’Sullivan recognized the look immediately: With the polo—I
O’Sullivan recognized the look immediately: “With the polo—I was like, I wore this.” And the more dressed-up moments had their own awkwardness. Looking back at school dances, O’Sullivan remembers teenagers transformed by elaborate updos into “40-year-old princesses of a weird country.”
Production designer Linda Lee similarly sought to “create familiarity without creating a caricature.” That meant letting different eras coexist in the interiors.
“The calendar might tell you that you’re in the 2000s, but your home doesn’t actually change that quickly,” she points out. Minnie’s house drew more heavily on the 1970s and ’80s, with bold colors and plenty of texture. Helen’s was more understated, incorporating elements from the ’80s and ’90s alongside newer additions. The contrast extends beyond the decor. Minnie’s mother, Barbara (Tara Mallen, Mallen Kupferer’s real-life mother), is a single parent and veterinarian whose sympathy for hard-luck cases has filled the house with rescue animals.
Her generosity leaves little room for domestic polish. Helen’s spacious home, with its freshly cooked dinners, offers Minnie an alluring alternative. To dress the girls’ bedrooms, Lee cut up old issues of Seventeen and J-14 sourced on eBay, assembling the kind of wall collages teenagers made from what images they had at hand. There were other bedroom essentials to track down too: O’Sullivan remembers Lee announcing, “We have secured the lava lamp.”
The film’s 2002 setting also shapes its portrayal of grief.
I don’t know how to write teenagers now,
“I don’t know how to write teenagers now, quite honestly,” O’Sullivan admits. “The way that we grieve has changed so much, culturally, with social media.” The story draws on her own experience of losing a friend in a car accident at the end of her junior year in 2001, though Minnie’s relationship with Helen is fictional. In the film’s largely offline world, news arrives not immediately and simultaneously but at its own pace, while public, sometimes competitive displays of grief require taking action rather than simply posting a photo carousel.
Cell phones are present but hardly universal: A Sidekick makes an appearance, and Callie has a chunky Nokia. (“Indestructible phones,” Lee calls them. “Could play Snake for hours,” O’Sullivan adds.)
For today’s teenage viewers, however, even the film’s most ordinary details can come as a surprise. After seeing Mouse, a young neighbor asked O’Sullivan, “Wait, your mom could pick up another phone in the house and hear your conversation?” She assured him that this was indeed possible—“and,” she says, shaking her head, “the source of a lot of stress.”
Source: www.vogue.com
