“Southside with You” director Richard Tanne returns with a YA romance that mildly confronts the genre’s confidence in manic pixie dream girls.
Soft guys, compiled! The ultra-sensitive high school melodrama you’ve been waiting for since February’s All the Bright Places’ has finally arrived, and it’s net holds back. This movie has it all: A rich teenage introvert desperately waiting for something interesting to happen to him, a mysterious blonde transfer student named Grace Town (!) Whose pronounced limp suggests a tragic past, a wistful voiceover trail laced with pearls of wisdom like “You never live more than when you were a teenager,” a queer Black best friend character who spends the entire movie with his girlfriend in the background, so much Beach House on the soundtrack that you can practice it seven feeling between your toes (one of the band’s songs even becomes a plot point), and an overpowering on a thin metaphor meant to trigger some sort of deep understanding – in this case, the idea that heartbeat is the same causing body reaction as physical pain.
Yes, “Chemical Hearts” is a prime (and sometimes almost self-parodic) example of a cinematic alchemy that will be well-known for a generation raised on John Green novels instead of “She’s All That.” But where the likes of “Paper Towns” and “The Fault in Our Stars” were inflated with a kind of manic pixie dream magic that inspired their characters to save each other or try to star, was Richard Tanne’s adaptation of Krystal Sutherland’s YA hit “Our Chemical Hearts” offers a relatively inert take on the same environment.
As a teenager adopts growing pains like a shot of novocaine controlled by a wobbly hand, this tender and subdued look around the limbo between adulthood and adulthood can begin with a luscious child trying to keep his stool from its darkest secrets, but it never gets instilled the idea that he actually can – quite the opposite, it steams the idea of white knight redemption to find some beauty in the scars that cannot heal. Bound by an excellent cast and a healthy awareness of how embarrassed it can be to feel young, Tanne’s low-key follow-up to Obama drama “Southside with You” should provoke a strong reaction from the pubescent audience, even if it even seriously can leave older crowds with the impression that it’s just “Normal People” for girls who have too much homework to watch a six-hour Hulu show.
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“Writing has always been my passion,” main character Henry Page tells us at the beginning of this story, the character and his name hooking at least two red flags before we even see his face (he is played by Austin Abrams, who each is equally grounded and believable here because he was in the under-seen “Brad’s Status.” The problem is that Henry has nothing to write about – a real obstacle for anyone who has decided to be the editor-in-chief at his It does not help that our boy suddenly has some unexpected competition for the job when the clever and beautiful – but disappointingly “damaged” – Grace (“Riverdale” phenomenon Lili Reinhart, also an executive producer) wears her hat in the Grace walks with a stick and reads Pablo Neruda poems for fun and those two things are basically enough to make her the most interesting person Henry has ever met.If it is decided that they will edit the paper together , it is only a matter of time before v onken begin to fly.
But this is a rather sucky movie, and Tanne’s first reaction is to put a damper on things if he can. Formally as they may feel, the early chapters of “Chemical Hearts” are infested with the tension of watching someone fall into their own trap. Attracted to Grace in the way that any insecure teenager can turn into a nice loneliness who seems to be wasting her own social potential, Henry – who has lived his entire life in a leafy suburb of the Garden State – throws the new girl silent as his owner Natalie Portman. He tries to use his care about puppy eyes in some love affair, but that concern looks a lot like casual stalking. We’re talking about one whose only identifying hobby is breaking broken glass pots in his bedroom; does New Jersey not have a TikTok?
In general, Henry struggles to strike a balance between the benevolent idyll of his upper-middle-class existence (Bruce Altman and Catherine Curtin play his happily married parents) and the intense rush of cinematic ability that shakes his body every time like a stargazer he sees Grace. It’s hard to know which of these worlds is more “real”, especially for a child whose crush takes him to secret caves and says farthest things like “we are all a collection of atoms that come together for a short period and then fall apart “As if she’s the rare 17-year-old who really knows what that means. But Henry means well, and Grace finally humiliates her once he begins to understand that she’s just a fucked-up girl looking for her. own peace of mind.
In a less thoughtful version of this film, the way Grace warms up to Henry may seem random or unmotivated, but one of the great strengths of ‘Chemical Hearts’ is how well it carries that extreme unprecision. Growing up is hardly an exact science, and Reinhart’s wounded but knowledgeable achievements can make her character invent things without the film having to apologize for her sudden changes of heart. Tanne’s “there are shadows in life, baby!” approach to these goods helps to redeem a route of underwritten and / or exaggerated moments towards the end, and he codifies that atmosphere with a more patient and open-ended aesthetic than you expect to find in a YA adaptation; made on a 35mm file that can vibrate an entire bedroom with potential, some entire scenes are captured in just a handful of static medium-wide shots that are not afraid to put these characters in a vast sea of their own feelings .
For a story that leans so hard in (and sometimes against) the most worthy tropes of its genre, “Chemical Hearts” has an unusual way of capturing the basic flammability of teenagers. That does not prevent the film from exploding as the SparkNotes of a more sweeping romance – all hot characters, from Henry’s heartthrob sister (Sarah Jones) to his best friends, played by Kara Young and CJ Hoff, are reduced to window dressing – or by you leaving the feeling that Grace is in principle still only a catalyst for Henry’s self-growth despite her unwillingness to ‘save’. But Tanne’s delicate touch leaves, well, a measure of grace in that. We all become memories of someone else, even if that sometimes forces us to go through other people’s scars. The hard part is just learning to accept that. “Try not to be good,” Grace tells Henry in one encounter he will surely never forget. “Just be here with me.”
Class: B-
“Chemical Hearts” will be available to stream on Amazon Prime beginning Friday, August 21st.
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