Saturday 23 September 2017

Everything, Everything (2017) - Movie Review


I’ve covered a lot of movies during this blog’s relatively short existence. In that time, I think I’ve run the gamut in terms of initial reactions. From the sensible (New Michael Bay Transformers movie is probably going to suck) to the somewhat irrational (The Angry Birds Movie has a vendetta against me personally), I’ve shown a pretty broad spectrum. Well, for the second time this year, we’re dealing with a film that I am having difficulty believing even exists in the first place.

A few months back, I caught the trailer for today’s film by chance on FaceBook; from how cheesy it was, I assumed that it was a parody video of sick-lit YA adaptations like The Fault In Our Stars. Then I looked it up and found out it was a real movie; still wasn’t convinced. Then I saw the trailer popping up at the cinemas proper; still wasn’t convinced. I went out and bought my ticket to see it; still wasn’t convinced. This is how much that initial trailer made me question reality; rarely does a film have to prove its own existence to me in such a manner. Then I sat down and watched it… and now I am still under the impression that this can’t be a real movie, but for different reasons. Different, horrifying, oh-my-God-what-the-actual-hell-were-these-people-thinking kind of reasons. But I’m once again getting ahead of myself.

The plot: Maddy (Amandla Stenberg), due to being diagnosed with SCID as a child, has lived her entire life in isolation from the outside world. Her immune system is so deficient that even a brief amount of time on the outside could result in her death. However, once she meets next-door neighbour Olly (Nick Robinson), she begins to wonder if her safe life on the inside is worth her missing out on everything life has to offer.

While I’m still capable of being fair to this… thing, I’ll admit that the cast here is pretty solid. Stenberg certainly makes a convincing case for herself as a lead actress, getting across the very understandable feeling of isolation, and eventually desperation, through very few words. Robinson as our romantic interest wear his character’s emo tendencies rather well, channelling bleakness without it being too self-pitying, and… okay, I’ll just come out and say/type it: These two are an embarrassingly cute couple.
 
Their chemistry is kind of astounding, given how they both get across social awkwardness in a very pointed way; the breaks of silence in their conversations are timed just right so that it’s relatable but not to the point where the tension makes you want to scream at the screen for them to do something. Then again, the fact that that was even a possibility in my brain should show how I tend to react to most social situations, so take that with a pinch of low-sodium salt substitute.
 
Ana de la Reguera makes for a warming presence early on, giving us some of the funnier exchanges in the movie between her and Stenberg, and Anika Noni Rose as the mother… actually, no; I’m not going to get to that just yet. Trust me, there’s a reason I’m saving this one.

Since sick-lit is pretty much an official sub-genre by this point, how does this fare against its competition? Well, it does tick a lot of the boxes associated with that label: Teen characters, terminal illness that is aided by the presence of a member of the opposite sex, meant-to-be-noticed intertextuality to make the story seem more sophisticated than it ultimately is, indie dream-pop soundtrack; you get the idea. While avoiding the more obvious comparison to the works of John Green, credit where it’s due in that this main concept, a retooling of the John Travolta classic(?) The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, is handled with some degree of skill.
 
For a start, and where all good romances should start, the main couple works. Really damn well, actually. Even with the forced distance between them, that sense that there is an actual romantic connection being made lands on solid ground. The illness itself is handled in a way so that it isn’t depicted solely as a lingering death sentence (which for any medical condition can only be a good thing) and that she has a reasonably comfortable life… but separating windows and computer screens just aren’t enough to capture that sense of the living, breathing outside world. Because of this, even with how hokey the film gets (and make no mistake, this can get hokey like it’s trying to hypnotise an army of zombie alien rectums… there has to be at least one other person who gets that reference), it still feels grounded enough in reality to let the rather sweet romance take form.

Credit is also due in the visual department, as it seems that director Stella Meghie and cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo had a pretty clear idea on how to present this film. A good chunk of the conversations between Maddy and Olly are done via texting, which hardly makes for great viewing, but the film goes about this in a way that highlights both Maddy’s overactive imagination and her desire for regular human contact. Each of these conversations play out as Maddy imagining saying everything to Olly face-to-face, complete with hyper-realistic locales like a diner and a library, all while not actually leaving the house. Considering how difficult the core notion of adapting a book into a film is in the first place, since there’s plenty of situations that only end up working in one or the other, this is easily one of the more inventive adaptations I’ve seen in a while, inexplicable astronaut in the background and all (there is technically an explanation for that last bit, but not that much; he’s just kind of there).
 
There’s also how Meghie and Jadue-Lillo managed to take a pretty swanky Los Angeles penthouse, decked out in the latest in disinfecting technology, and make even the biggest rooms in the house still feel like a small prison. Emphasising how much of the world she can contact, and the space that she still has to live in, makes the sporadic tropical vacation seem like the most logical thing in the world. I’d be nitpicking that little development until my computer finally gives up, but there are bigger fish to fry.

All of this seems pretty decent so far, right? A cheesy and rather self-inserty romance with some cool visual touches; it’s not exactly the best thing I’ve ever seen but it’s definitely serviceable. And then, the fucking ending happens. *SPOILERS*, just to be safe, but this is one of those situations where I have to get into spoilers to explain just how baffling the film turns out and how much it sours the whole film that came before it.
 
So, it turns out that Maddy isn’t actually sick. In the wake of her father and brother’s deaths in a car crash, Maddy’s mother was so scared of losing the only family she has left that she lied to her for 18 years by saying that she was so sick that she could never leave the house, when in reality she would only be sick from the lack of regular exposure to germs. This is why I couldn’t discuss the mother in the cast round-up: Because her character, and I genuinely hate saying this, is an absolute cunt and I don’t want that.
 
She gaslights her own daughter and, even before the final twist takes place, is protective to the point of being potentially abusive anyway. When she finds out that her daughter has been seeing Olly, she takes away her Internet and mobile phone privileges, AKA the only real connection she has to the outside world, save for Olly. Trying to fix someone’s feeling of isolation by isolating them further, combined with her lying to her own daughter for all this time, is bad enough but not to the point where I can’t forgive. She’s vile and should have all of her shoes taken and all of her carpeting replaced with LEGO bricks; no problem there.

The problem comes in when you realise that, after all this is revealed, nothing happens to her. The mother explains that she was just so scared and worried for her daughter’s safety, they part ways and that’s it. If this film had any real connection to reality, like the rest of the film seems to, this woman would be arrested for child abuse and rightly fucking so. No, the fear of grief isn’t an excuse for her behaviour, and the film trying to sugarcoat this whole mess isn’t helping either. If the film actually came to terms with this woman’s actions, or maybe even gave a sense that she would get some form of punishment for essentially ruining her own daughter’s formative years and possibly her entire life, I would be fine with this.
 
Instead, much like Collateral Beauty from earlier this year, this film presents heinous behaviour and tries to pass it off as well-intended concern. The fact that I even made the comparison to Collateral Beauty should tell you already how much I am not going to put up with this.

All in all, what starts out as a slightly far-fetched but overall decent romance, in record time, inadvertently turns into a psychological thriller. I say “inadvertently” because, given how the signs pointing to psycho-horror are weakly covered-up and hand-waved away, not to mention dropped like an atom bomb at the last minute, I doubt that the people involved actually realised how bad this comes across. The acting is good and some of the directional choices are seriously inspired, but holy mother of ass-fuck, that ending poisons every single bit of it. I am really getting tired of films thinking that it’s perfectly okay to excuse gaslighting as acceptable behaviour, especially films that are about as hard-edged as a bowl of rice to begin with; the real world is full of this kind of shit already, we don’t really need more voices excusing this nonsense.

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