THE JOURNAL
What Mr Jason Bateman’s Ozark Business-Casual Style Says About The State Of The World Today
Mr Jason Bateman and Ms Katrina Lenk in Ozark (2022). Photograph courtesy of Netflix
Ms Chaka Khan (or, indeed, Ms Whitney Houston) may claim to be every woman, but Mr Jason Bateman is every man. Or rather, everyman. In fact, he’s the everyman’s everyman. Over a 40-year career, the actor, who this week returns in the final season of Netflix’s Ozark, has played all flavours of your average Joe. From the prospective parent of Juno to Arrested Development’s “story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together”, foreshadowing the financial meltdown of the later 2000s.
He’s been bosses, squares, guys next door. Friends, boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, and now almost exclusively dads. He usually plays by the rules and, yes, at times he’s an asshole – and at one point a werewolf – but he’s always relatable, like someone you know.
In 1992, President George HW Bush framed his (unsuccessful) re-election campaign around a promise to make the American family “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons”. Bateman is in the unusual position of straddling both worlds. Well, almost. He’s made several cameos in Springfield, that much is true. But he made his acting debut, aged 12, in Little House On The Prairie, a contemporary of The Waltons that shared many of its wholesome values.
Since then, he’s notched up close to 100 entries on IMDb and has broadened his range to include stints behind the camera. It makes him a familiar sight on our screens and a great cultural thermometer with which to gauge where we are at as a society at any moment in time. And, going on Ozark, we might not be in the best of places right now.
This is no slight on the region in Missouri that lends its name to the series. Dramatically altered by irrigation work during the early 20th century, today this flank of land boasts more shoreline than the coast of California. This is in fact part of the sales pitch that brings it to the attention of Marty Byrde (Bateman) in the first episode of the show. But the American dream that big-city transplant Byrde is toiling towards becomes by increments closer to a nightmare.
On the surface at least, Byrde is perhaps the straightest of Bateman’s many straight men, a mild-mannered, muted and meticulous financial advisor. But this demeanour and skillset also make him the perfect frontman for a drug cartel. He’s a shill, closing in on a big pay-out, although as the series progresses, we’re never sure whether money, safety or just the game itself is what drives him. Bateman plays a man playing his cards close to his chest.
“Because nothing Bateman’s character wears gives us ‘main character’ energy, he can assimilate into many roles”
Byrde’s wardrobe, too, gives little away. In keeping with the broody tone of the series, the clothes Byrde wears are often stark, understated and as rooted in navy as the filter the show is shot through. The overall vibe is dark, something of a trope in present-day prestige television. But this isn’t representative of Bateman’s career.
In Juno, his plaid-clad would-be dad in band tees hinted at a life he left behind. The shirts were mostly neatly tucked in to the chinos of Michael (actually Nichael) Bluth in Arrested Development as he tried to hold it together while his family fell apart. Even the outfits of Pepper Brooks, Bateman’s turn as a sports commentator in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, also had a story to tell, coming off the back of the baggy sportswear of the nu metal trend. (In the words of Brooks, “It’s a bold strategy… Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.”) Meanwhile, Byrde gives us nothing.
“I had to rewatch seasons one to three to jog my memory when it comes to what Marty Byrde wears,” says Ms Sophie Watson, MR PORTER’s Junior Fashion Editor. “But perhaps that’s precisely it. His wardrobe lends itself to being wholly inconspicuous and under the radar.
Mr Jason Bateman in Ozark (2020). Photograph by Ms Tina Rowden, courtesy of Netflix
“Relocating his family from Chicago to set up a money-laundering scheme was never Marty’s endgame and so he navigates this illicit venture by blending in to his new environment in a way that only he knows how. Micro-plaid shirts, dark chinos, wind-breakers and the occasional public-facing black suit, not forgetting a trusty pair of New Balance runners and his TAG Heuer timepiece. His daily uniform is the casualwear carry-over from his time in the big city, which reads as authority figure, but honest and trustworthy, all the while actively deceiving the locals one by one.”
Watson points out that Osage Beach, the show’s location, is rarely seen here in its high-summer tourist mode. “The off-season temperature reads as gloomy and bleak, which is reflected in Marty’s palette of inky blues, washed-out blacks and charcoals,” she says. “J.Crew, Club Monaco and James Perse are the brands that I imagine Marty must wear. It’s all-American normcore and a steadfast ‘dad’ uniform.”
From John Walton Sr to Homer Simpson, the dad’s role in the evolving American family is something that TV has always attempted to document. Marty Byrde is unusual, however, in that he’s trying his hardest not to be the star of the show. “Because nothing Bateman’s character wears gives us ‘main character’ energy, he can assimilate into many roles,” says Watson. “Father, husband, financial advisor, owner of a boating lodge, plus a nefarious strip club and riverboat casino and now, chiefly, a Mexican cartel associate, all under the cloak of ‘a regular-looking guy’.”
It’s always the quiet ones you have to watch.
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