Some may be annoyed when this happens, but from my chaotic point-of-view, it’s always a bit amusing to see a popular trend continue on well after reaching its zenith. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, YA adaptations and romantic teen melodramas were all the rage; think about the widespread popularity of the Twilight or Hunger Games franchises, or author John Green‘s rapid ascendance to superstardom.
The latter’s novels quickly became emblematic of a particular mode of YA fiction, where “quirky” characters and oddly fantastical scenarios invade the lives of angst-filled teenagers. Sure, that nightmarish Paper Towns movie was a disaster, but The Fault in Our Stars practically defined an era. And by actually working as a melodrama, that film helped to further establish the young adult genre’s dominance.
Unfortunately for Hollywood producers looking to make a buck, the dominance was short-lived. It’s now 2019, a time when all of the would-be young adult franchises and blockbuster adaptations have vanished quietly into the night. It’s in this new marketplace that Justin Baldoni‘s Five Feet Apart feels like a movie that’s somewhat out of place, searching for an audience that won’t quite be found (per Box Office Mojo, the film has made $28.1 million as of March 26th).
New Twist on Star-Crossed Lovers
But ignoring the commercial concerns for a second, there was always some potential for this film to succeed on an artistic level. First, it stars Haley Lu Richardson, who, thanks to the one-two punch of Kogonada‘s Columbus and Andrew Buljaski‘s Support the Girls, has quickly become one of the strongest actors on the planet. And shockingly, it’s actually not based on any previous source material – this was an original script from Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis. Despite these signs of optimism, the latest tragic romance aimed at the teenage set is dragged down by a healthy dose of preposterous excess, turning a theoretically sweet tale into something cheesy and exhausting.
The film follows Stella (Richardson), a teenage girl with cystic fibrosis (from here, I’ll refer to it as CF), a respiratory disease that causes her body to produce too much mucus. The nature of Stella’s disease prevents her from having a normal life, leading to elongated stays in the hospital and an extremely close reliance on Nurse Barb (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) and fellow CF patient Poe (Moises Arias). Stella is also a fairly popular vlogger, dedicated to educating people all around the globe about CF. She has a strict regimen for administering her medications, and she’s determined to survive long enough to get a new pair of lungs and live another five years.
Enter Will (Cole Sprouse). He has a more advanced form of CF, one that makes it increasingly dangerous for him to be around any other CF patient. Will has taken up residence in the hospital for an experimental drug treatment, but he’s either too cynical to believe that he has a chance or too much of a bad boy to care. In the long-standing tradition of romance movies, Stella and Will are mismatched in every conceivable way. But as both begin to push back against each other’s hardened shell of trauma, the two slowly fall in love.
Endearing Qualities in a Familiarly Silly Format
Of course, it wouldn’t be a tragic romance without some obstacle for our lovers to overcome. And, as the title indicates, Stella and Will are required to stay five feet apart from each other; the actual required distance is six feet, but Stella delivers a big monologue about cutting down the length as a way of fighting CF. Believe it or not, this actually presents a moderately interesting challenge for the film to solve: how can you communicate a certain level of romance or passion without allowing the main characters to touch each other? It’s a distinctly cinematic love story, forcing director Baldoni to play some games with the framing and staging of each scene.
Much to my own surprise at various points, the film also has a very solid emotional center beyond its basic narrative, as it ends up revealing itself to be a rather tragic story about a girl in a terrible situation who is slowly losing everything uplifting and positive in her life.
Without delving into too many spoilers, Five Feet Apart is at its best when it’s not concerned with Will and Stella’s romance, instead turning its attention to how Stella’s own personal pain is manifested in her overwhelming desire for control. In addition to the debilitating disease, there’s a particularly heartbreaking backstory in play, which ends up being the most cathartic and satisfying element by a mile.
If the moments of genuine poignancy come as a surprise, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Haley Lu Richardson is the standout. This performance has already been widely praised (often with the caveat that she saves the movie), but I was still struck by the empathy her performance almost effortlessly generates. Stella is a thrilling character, regardless of the film she’s stuck in.
Excessive Running Time, Diminishing Returns
Of course, focusing on the good in Five Feet Apart ignores…. well, everything else here. As observant and empathetic as the film can be (there’s a rather remarkable amount of detail about CF, which is both important contextual information and just plain informative) it reaches a point where the pain and suffering heaped onto Stella reaches a point of cruelty that feels inexplicable. Really, how much more should a character be tortured? I know pretending that any of this is rooted in real or ethical decision-making is folly, but how absurdly melodramatic do we need to be?
Amusingly enough, this is a film that avoids many of the trauma porn hallmarks of this particular sub-genre; without spoiling much, the big event that we’ve been led to dread (and anticipate) is never shown in any explicit fashion. Still, this final act of mercy on Stella by the filmmakers only happens after two hours (!) of terrible things happening to these teenagers, often in increasingly preposterous ways. Though I would argue that the core romance in the film never really clicks in the first place due to some chemistry problems with Sprouse and Richardson, it’s especially frustrating to watch a film repeatedly find a way to put its characters in contrived situations, situations that defy the logic of what we’ve been told about them from the very start.
By the third act, Baldoni and the screenwriters are required by the laws of narrative momentum to find a way to push towards some dramatic crescendo, and it ends up being almost hilariously excessive in nature. For a film that spends so much of its time grounded in the day-to-day reality of living with an awful disease, the final stretch seems hellbent on creating an almost Shakespearean scenario, forcing characters to make moronic choices that betray their motivations and personalities. And then, after putting its characters through the wringer and subsequently restricting the payoff of the entire story, Five Feet Apart ends with easy platitudes instead of something more genuine.
Five Feet Apart: Conclusion
In an odd manner, this clash between grounded humanity and an extravagant (tragic) fantasy is in play from the very start. In the film’s very first scene, Baldoni‘s use of a handheld camera is hyper-active and weirdly jittery, capturing a rather plain interaction between Stella and her friends in the most disarming way possible. It’s a pretty unnecessary introduction for a teen romance – and it’s also the only time this particular method of camera movement is used throughout the entire film.
Look, I certainly would have complained if the camera was bouncing around for the whole runtime. Yet it’s this general atmosphere of inconsistency that lessens Five Feet Apart’s effect by the minute, eventually forcing a great character and an empathetic performance to submit to the constraints of a dying genre, where needless drama ultimately supersedes any kind of realism.
The teen melodrama may still be alive, but the latest tragic romance proves that it’s far from thriving.
What did you think of Five Feet Apart? What’s your favorite YA romance movie? Let us know in the comments below!
Five Feet Apart was released on March 15, 2019 in the US and on March 22, 2019 in the UK. For full international release information, click here.
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