Here’s one of those passable, cloying YA adaptations that’s
totally artificial and utterly sentimental, torn between metaphoric exploration
of romantic teen alienation and stupidly contrived conceits. Everything, Everything (so nice they
named it twice) is about an 18-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg) who has lived
locked inside behind air filters and Plexiglas as long as she can remember. It’s
for her health and safety, since her deadly immune deficiency was discovered by
her protective physician mother (Anika Noni Rose). The girl has cultivated a
rich and playful interior life through reading books, watching movies (always
nice to see even a glance of Moonstruck),
and checking in on support group chat rooms. But one day, a cute boy her age (Nick
Robinson) moves in next door and, in a twist usually only found in stories like
this, his bedroom window that looks right into hers. They make eyes at each
other for a bit, then he writes his phone number on the glass. She texts. He
texts back. It’s love at first emoticon, or maybe at first read receipt. The
more she gets to know him, the more she wants to go outside, an urge we’re too
swoon over despite the very real threat to her life if she encounters those
germs floating in the world at large. Sure, the course of true love never did
run smooth, but why risk everything (everything)?
Adapting Nicola Yoon’s book, the screenplay by J. Mills
Goodloe (The Age of Adaline) contorts
itself to justify the romantic urges, finding tragic backstory and
late-breaking twists to convince the audience that it’s all for the better. So
it has a premise that’s barely convincing on a literal level and yet – and yet!
– it’s often sweet and emotionally appealing because of the unassuming openness
of its lead and the soft-spoken, underplayed loveliness of its metaphor. What
is first teen love but the blushing sense of getting away with something? The
movie doesn’t exactly work, but, hey, I’m not made of stone, either. Stenberg
brings shy expressiveness to her confined character, able to communicate her
deep yearning for human contact through bashful glances while also signaling
the fierce intelligence behind her hesitant smiles and flustered flirting.
She’s totally believable as a girl who has more time alone with her thoughts
and who has read more than most her age, and yet has experienced precious
little of what we’d call the real world. She’s able to give the movie the
earnest innocent desires and curiosity that almost provide enough emotional
oomph to make the construct work.
Although director Stella Meghie shoots the movie with a pleasant
commercial gloss – all bright sets, soft lighting, gauzy close-ups, slick
pop-music montages, and coy, implied PG-13 heat – it also gives the sense it’s
as closed off as its main character. The darker implications of its premise
remain unexplored, tossed overboard for the sake of maintaining a sense of
teenage fantasy and persecution. But the way it allows space for Stenberg’s
performance to ping off Rose’s strong, stern, maternal love gives the movie the
small metaphoric charge it needs to be effective. It becomes, in its strongest
moments, a movie about the lengths a parent can go to maintain a child’s safety,
security, and purity. Starting with good intentions, this can result in a young
person for whom flirtation, let alone dating, seems like a far riskier and
fraught prospect than it should. This is a simple movie about teenage love that
deploys its dramatic conceit to literalize the sheltered girl’s boxed in
feelings, then watches as they’re coaxed out through a sense of determination
and outside influences. She and her crush are cute together. He’s sweet. She’s
nice. Meghie gives their texting an imaginary mind palace of a meeting spot –
fantasies of actual dialogue in the likes of a retro diner and in outer space
taking the place of text bubbles as they grow closer – and when they finally
appear in the same room, share the same space, well, I said I’m not made of
stone. Even middling movies can occasionally get their hooks in you.
