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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