3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.19.17
Nicola Yoon’s fans will be over
the moon.
They really couldn’t ask for
more. Director Stella Meghie’s adaptation of Everything, Everything benefits from the savvy casting of two
engaging stars — Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson — and a script (J. Mills
Goodloe) that adheres faithfully to the 2015 young adult best-seller.
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| Once Olly (Nick Robinson) learns that Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) cannot ever leave her house, he struggles for ways to help "imagine" her into the big, wide, outside world. |
The film is swooningly romantic,
start to finish, and guaranteed to send its target audience into dreamy
euphoria.
The rest of us ... perhaps not.
Folks who enjoy both books and
films have long known that some things work very well on the printed page, not
so much on the big screen. Suspension of disbelief is easier, when we concoct
the pictures in our minds; we gloss over inconvenient details likely to
interfere with the unfolding narrative.
Having such a story translated
into the real world of a motion picture brings such “problems” into the crisp
focus of cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo’s lens, making them impossible to
ignore. Contrivance becomes obvious, particularly since the story unfolds much
faster, in a 96-minute film, than in a 336-page novel. Questions emerge;
eyebrows lift; and — worst case — the spell is broken.
And, sadly, Meghie and Goodloe
make that very likely to occur. They’re not sufficiently careful with niggly
little details that Yoon’s readers will be happy to overlook, but which will
prompt frowns from the uninitiated.
Suburban-dwelling Madeline
Whittier (Stenberg), days shy of her 18th birthday, suffers from severe
combined immunodeficiency (SCID), popularly known as “bubble baby disease.”
Since infancy, she has been confined to a hermetically sealed wing of the Los
Angeles house that she shares with her mother, Pauline (Anika Noni Rose), a
physician who cares for her around the clock.
Maddy cannot leave the house, or
come in contact with anything that hasn’t been thoroughly sanitized. Her sole
contact with the outer world is Carla (Ana de la Reguera), the nurse who visits
each day while Pauline is at work, and Carla’s teenage daughter, Rosa (Danube
R. Hermosillo). Everything they wear must be disinfected, each time they enter
the house.
(Just in passing, Pauline must be
an über-specialist who makes more money than God, because the state-of-the-art
medical and physical enhancements to this home didn’t come cheap, and would be
atrociously expensive to maintain. And that’s niggly detail No. 1.)
