‘Everything, Everything’ lacks just one thing: Tears
“Everything, Everything” is a flawed film in many ways, but there is one that’s a deal breaker: It doesn’t make you cry.
In fact, for reasons that shouldn’t be revealed, it doesn’t even really try to. The story of a teenage girl who can’t leave her house because of a severe autoimmune disorder who falls in love with the boy next door practically screams for a box of tissues.
But director Stella Meghie’s film, based on the Nicola Yoon novel, doesn’t deliver.
It’s got all the other ingredients: Maddy (Amandla Stenberg), the beautiful young woman who’s sick; Olly (Nick Robinson), the hunky, sensitive teen who moves in next door; a soundtrack filled with young, soulful singer-songwriters crooning about love and loss.
It’s like a 14-year-old girl made a movie based on a Bon Iver video.
The shame is that the beginning of the movie is interesting(ish). We see
Maddy in her airtight, germ-free home, where she lives with her mother, Pauline (Anika Noni Rose), a doctor. Her nurse, Carla (Ana de la Reguera), is there practically all the time, and she’s allowed visits with a disinfected Rosa (Danube R. Hermosillo), her friend and Carla’s daughter.
Her father and brother died in a car accident when she was a baby, so Maddy’s mom, Carla and Rosa are really all she has. Other than that it’s life lived through her computer, her phone (making her not unlike a lot of teenagers, really) and the open, glass-heavy room her mother had built for her, to at least approximate the feeling of being outside.
And then one day Olly and his family move in. He grabs his skateboard off the moving truck, drifts by her window, waves and a mutual attraction is engaged. It’s kind of cute and sweet. We don’t learn much about Olly, only that his father is an abusive drunk. Perhaps this is because we see things from Maddy’s perspective (she says he doesn’t talk about some things, though presumably as they grow closer he might tell her more).
What Maddy wants, of course, is to live. The cruel joke the universe is playing on her is that doing so would kill her. She turns 18 during the film, and has lived far longer than most patients with her disorder do, she tells us.
So is it better to fully enjoy a life that might kill her, or to continue living inside her own home and head?
“Everything, Everything” would be a far better movie if at this point you could say something like, “Meghie doesn’t provide easy answers.” But you can’t. It’s not a cop-out, exactly, more of a complete switching of gears. It’s a clunky transition.
Where are the tears? We were promised tears! Well, not explicitly, but that’s the understanding in a movie like this.
It would also be nice to say that the film refuses to bow to convention, that it charts a new course for the romantic teen weeper.
That’s not true, either. Instead, it just comes off like a poorly plotted story, one that isn’t particularly appealing.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goody koontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.