Taking chances for love
EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING
Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera Director: Stella Meghie
WHEN the longed-for first kiss between neighbours Maddy and Olly arrives in Everything, Everything, the air around the two young lovers shimmers with the reflection of fireworks. Everything – everything! – is heightened between these two, as it should be – not just because they’re 18-year-olds in love, but because Maddy, confined to her house for medical reasons, never expected to experience direct contact with the world, let alone physical intimacy with a boy.
Working from J Mills Goodloe’s adaptation of Nicola Yoon’s debut young adult novel, director Stella Meghie wisely emphasises the sensuous aspects of this story of awakening. Jolts of humour and fantasy bring welcome texture to the romance-novel sleekness. While the young-love melodrama isn’t about to entice older viewers, the target audience will swoon.
As the stylish bookworm Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) is smart and yearning, a princess trapped in a castle. Because of the severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID, that makes her vulnerable to life-threatening infections, she’s spent most of her life within the hermetically sealed expanses of a glamorous house in a tiny corner of Los Angeles.
Besides Maddy and her physician mother, Pauline (Anika Noni Rose), Maddy’s spirited nurse, Carla (Ana de la Reguera), and her daughter, Rosa (Danube R Hermosillo), are the only people who ever enter the house. New neighbour Olly (Nick Robinson) arrives just in time for Maddy’s 18th birthday, a poetically long-haired skateboarding prince.
He’s a transplanted New Yorker who dresses in black and has a compelling way of looking at her. From mutually enchanted pantomimes across their facing bedroom windows, they advance to late-night text convos. Meghie spares us an overload of on-screen text by shifting some of those digital exchanges into a fantasy realm.
Back amid the showroom decor of Maddy’s home, Carla quickly twigs to what’s going on between Maddy and the boy next door. Carla doesn’t take much convincing to arrange Olly’s visit across the sacrosanct threshold. Soon, Maddy wants more than occasional indoor visits, and is ready to risk her life for the moments of connection.
Meghie embraces the high degree of teen self-awareness, just as she does the young adult clarity of the story’s driving metaphors. In the exuberance and tenderness between Stenberg and Robinson, Everything is a persuasive argument for taking chances.