Everything, Everything
Directed by: Stella Meghie
Written by: J. Mills Goodloe - Based on the book by Nicola Yoon
Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera, Taylor Hickson, Danube R. Hermosillo, Marion Eisman
Drama/Romance - 96 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 May 2017
Written by: J. Mills Goodloe - Based on the book by Nicola Yoon
Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera, Taylor Hickson, Danube R. Hermosillo, Marion Eisman
Drama/Romance - 96 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 May 2017
Did you write a Young Adult novel which caught a spark in your main demographic? Are the main characters a boy and girl, preferably misunderstood, physically sick, and/or prevented from being together? Then the mid-to-late 2010s is your oyster because studios are lining up nowadays to throw formulas with these ingredients at audiences. Kids have cancer? Here, have some Fault in Our Stars. Unrequited love with a mysterious girl? Paper Towns just for you. If I Stay, Before I Fall, and the Divergent franchise can also tag along. Here’s one: girl is sick, must spend her entire life indoors, new boy next door is cute, so what’s wrong with a little risk on the viral side so we can ask each other our favorite color?
Everything, Everything, a title which only works if you see the connection inside the story, spawns from a debut novel by YA author Nicola Yoon. Instead of terminal cancer, ADHD, or anything to do with a coma or time loop, just turned 18 year-old Maddy Whittier (Amandla Stenberg, Rio 2), suffers from SCID, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, aka the Bubble Boy disease made famous by one of the more infamous Seinfeld episodes; “It’s a boy in a bubble!” Maddy is not in a bubble. She roams an architectural marvel of a house hermetically sealed in Los Angeles. All of her clothes are irradiated, she only comes into contact with three people, and longingly gazes out the windows all day dreaming about the outside world which is just waiting to kill her should she ever leave her cocoon.
Everything, Everything, a title which only works if you see the connection inside the story, spawns from a debut novel by YA author Nicola Yoon. Instead of terminal cancer, ADHD, or anything to do with a coma or time loop, just turned 18 year-old Maddy Whittier (Amandla Stenberg, Rio 2), suffers from SCID, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, aka the Bubble Boy disease made famous by one of the more infamous Seinfeld episodes; “It’s a boy in a bubble!” Maddy is not in a bubble. She roams an architectural marvel of a house hermetically sealed in Los Angeles. All of her clothes are irradiated, she only comes into contact with three people, and longingly gazes out the windows all day dreaming about the outside world which is just waiting to kill her should she ever leave her cocoon.
Maddy’s world of online support groups, reading, writing witty reviews of her reading, and crafting advanced building models is turning upside down. She’s 18 now, her best and only real-world friend is going away to college, and a cute boy just moved in next door. He wears all black, needs a haircut, says his favorite book is Lord of the Flies, and is dealing with an alcoholic, abusive father. Yeah, he’ll do. Olly (Nick Robinson, The 5th Wave) plays a very coherent and extroverted loner even though his whole persona screams, “treat me like the misanthrope I am trying pass myself off as!” Olly is more intrigued than scared by Maddy’s predicament and perhaps appreciates the captive audience as the two start to use each other as their soundboards.
It is standard practice now to watch characters carry out a texting conversation as the director puts their words right on the screen. Sometimes we get voiceover and sometimes we read along subtitle style. Because so much of Everything, Everything’s dialogue takes place between teenagers separated by a barrier with their phones representing two tin cans and string, director Stella Meghie wisely took the scrolling text away and put Maddy and Olly in the same room together. To circumvent the obvious physical logic, Meghie places them opposite one another in a diner booth. The diner is one of Maddy’s architecture models and they’re one-on-one conversation is only in their minds, but it plays well for the audience who are spared the pain of texts on screen but never quite forget the two are not truly occupying the same space.
When Maddy and Olly finally break the rules and meet each other on the sly, their usual undergrad level conversations nose-dive into Anakin Skywalker territory. Olly shares this gem about nature, “I respect the ocean. It’s impersonal and murderous.” That is not as atrocious as Anakin’s speech about not liking sand, but they’re verbal cousins. I get it, each generation of teens has their own language, but Everything, Everything screams teenager. It is a movie for teens only. Only movie teens would throw caution to the wind, risk a painful, viral death just so they can make out and whisper grade-level sweet nothings about love. Even those who are reminded every single day how only one germ could send them on to oblivion believe they are never going to get old and die. Viva la boneheaded teenager. What I’m saying is this is not for 30-somethings with kids.
Accompanying the saccharine love story are today’s carefully selected contemporary pop hits and a bag full of montages. There is the riding in a jeep montage which is really just frequent cuts while a car travels from the airport to a hotel, a swimming montage, and even a smile from across the way montage as Maddy and Olly ogle each other from their bedroom windows. It would be a challenge for even the most adept of filmmakers to keep our interest in Maddy’s housebound life but even Me Before You (2016) kept our attention most of the time while that wheelchair-bound gentleman was in similar circumstances. Amandla Stenberg is no Emilia Clarke however; Clarke was born with charisma and personality oozing out of her pores.
Everything, Everything is Stella Meghie’s second feature film but the first one which will be widely seen in theaters. One tip of the hat to Meghie and screenplay adaptor J. Miles Goodloe is nobody at all mentions the kids are an interracial couple. The kids never bring it up nor any of the brief supporting roles. This comes off as a refreshing confidence and while I never believed in the couple’s chemistry, they’re unspoken ethnicities earns a kudo. However, it is not all Meghie’s fault the story morphs from average teenage dramatics to the Fonz jumping the shark in a matter of seconds. Perhaps no director could save the plot from its eye rolling, blindsiding conclusion. Spoiler avoiders beware too much social media plot summary floating around out there lest you ruin the end of a pretty shabby tale.
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