Review: Everything, Everything
Movies about the beautiful dying girl finding love are modern-day fairy tales. Never mind that death is around the corner, a girl's happy ending is in experiencing true love at the height of her youth with a boy who will love her as she is and with whom she will overcome all obstacles before she breathes her last breath. As sappy as these movies are, they are undeniably satisfying to their target audience.
Everything, Everything, adapted from the 2015 YA novel by Nicola Yoon, certainly doesn't deviate from the template successfully followed by A Walk to Remember and The Fault in Our Stars, but it does offer some inventive direction from Stella Meghie and charming performances from Nick Robinson and Amandla Stenberg, whose presence provides rare but hopefully soon-to-be commonplace representation for those who don't normally see someone like themselves onscreen.
Stenberg is Maddy, a princess trapped in a castle due to an auto-immune disorder named Severe Combine Immune Deficiency (SCID). So rare is this disorder that the merest exposure to the outside world could mean certain death for Maddy, whose clothes have to be sterilised and whose house is equipped with airtight entryways. For companionship, she has her physician mother Pauline (a fierce Anika Noni Rose) and her nurse Carla (Danube R. Hermosillo), but she mostly spends her time alone, writing book reviews and building models for her online architecture class and lamenting over how each day seems to be the same.
That is, until Olly (Robinson) moves in next door. Transplanted from New York with his family, Olly instantly takes to Maddy and they're soon communicating with each other via pantomiming and late-night text conversations. Meghie depicts their text exchanges as actual face-to-face conversations taking place in real-life versions of Maddy's building models; the gambit reinforces how talking with Olly makes Maddy feel as if she's in the outside world. Soon the young lovers are inhabiting the same space with Carla's help, and Maddy decides to risk her health and her mother's wishes to end things with Olly by running away with him to Hawaii to have a chance to experience life.
Everything, Everything is a tremendously appealing film due in no small part to its two leads. Stenberg and Robinson complement one another beautifully, both deftly navigating the more mawkish elements of their relationship. However, that third act reveal almost breaks the spell that Meghie and her cast have woven. Suddenly, one can't ignore details in the narrative that are either illogical, too convenient or, in the case of Olly's own dysfunctional family, barely fleshed out. Yet it's difficult to begrudge the film its flaws as its central relationship is so winningly portrayed and with very little of the treacle that usually comes part and parcel with this genre.
Everything, Everything
Directed by: Stella Meghie
Written by: J. Mills Goodloe; based on the novel by Nicola Yoon
Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Danube R. Hermosillo
