Everything, Everything
Maddy Whittier ( Amandla Stenberg), the hero of Everything, Everything, likes building architectural models in her bedroom and writing pithy book reviews on the Internet. Her favourite word is “uxorious,” she swoons to Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez and is a great admirer of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Maddy is, in short, the kind of bright, plucky teenage girl familiar from any number of young-adult novels and their seemingly inevitable studio adaptations — with the distinction that she is possessed of the immunodeficiency disease that rather famously confined a little boy to his sterilized bubble. Maddy yearns for a life rich in family-friendly adolescent activity. But alas Maddy must not leave the decontaminated quarantine of her bourgeois suburban- Californian house.
Because this is a youngadult drama whose vapidity is cliché- ordained, our Maddy one afternoon finds a fetching boy named Olly ( Nick Robinson) as a new next- door neighbour. The two naturally meet-cute from afar and summarily fall in love. Maddy and Olly cannot touch one another or even be in the same room at the same time. Her fatal condition forbids any conventional contact — and so the besotted pair are resigned to develop their affection through an inch of glass. A romance of Shakespearean proportions blossoms as they gaze out smitten from opposite bedroom windows. They make eyes, text and fantasize about all they might do face-to-face.
This story is of course a sort of parable: ah, communication mediated by glass, you see, is the modern condition, and the film proposes that there isn’t very much difference after all between a windowpane and the screen of your phone. Teenagers will relate to this chronicle of a relationship wrenched apart by circumstance, the thinking goes, because the relationships enjoyed by teenagers today tend widely to be conducted at a similar remove. Maddy and Olly’s infirm affair being, in other words, not unlike dating over IM and Skype. Technology has made possible connections unthinkable even a decade ago. The effect on matters of the heart is what this film seems for a time intent, not unin-triguingly, to explore.
As it happens this exploration is limited by delicacy — and a PG-13 rating. Have you any idea what two lusting 18-year-olds are likely to get up to at night with an infatuation and a front- facing camera? Rather more than the wholesome flirtation this movie suggests, to be sure.
Maddy, pure as the driven snow, seems incapable of entertaining a salacious thought about her paramour, and what desire she shows has been neutered into a virtuous emotional longing; the innocence is so thick their relationship seems not only implausible but cartoonish, an out- of- touch adult’s idea of what goes through young people’s heads. When Maddy and Olly do consummate their romance, it is as chaste as First Communion.
How can any interesting comment be made about how we live today if the reality is so decorously rejected? It’s a parable compromised by politesse. Ω