The Half of It Review (5/2/2020)

The thing I think that people need to understand about teen movies is that, while all of the problems teenagers worry about can often come off as vapid and petty to anybody but them, within those select few years of middle school and high school, when children are beginning to experience adult thoughts and emotions and to become an active member of society but are not yet ready for - or, if they're lucky, exposed to - the intricacies of the real world, these problems tend to make up their entire world. For all of the romanticization heaped upon it by popular culture, adolescence is an often scary and always confusing time full of complicated emotions and unknown motivations. In my opinion, many teen dramas fail to grasp this, and instead try and spice up the drama with unnecessary baggage - look no further than the melodramatic mess of scandals, murders and unnecessary mysteries of tv series like 13 Reasons Why for an example. To be a good teen movie, a director and writer must first understand that the petty melodrama of your typical high school is more than enough to keep its core audience engaged on its own - because these are the kinds of problems that they actually deal with.

The Half of It understands the core of the teen film perfectly, and then goes on further; by populating it with living, breathing characters that even more "high brow" dramas often lack. This is the kind of Netflix original that would normally have flown entirely under my radar, by since I was stuck at home and looking for something nice and gay to watch to soothe my anxious lesbian soul, I put it on for my weekly review. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's the rare high school drama that just seems to balance both the felt weight of the issues that seem to be important than, and the apparent impact of the things that really stick with us for the rest of our lives.

The film's set up is actually quite unique; following a rarely-portrayed viewpoint in a chinese-american teenage girl in small town America, Ellie Chu runs a small business writing essays for her classmates for money. When approached by Paul Munsky, a seemingly dim-witted football jock, she is offered money to help him woo his crush, Aster Flores, by writing his love letters. This idea is pretty much doomed from the start, especially when it becomes apparent that Ellie too is in love with Aster, and the two of them have far more in common than Aster and Paul.

What follows is an often amusing, often embarassing string of love letters, text messages and awkward dates, where Ellie pretends to be Paul in the writing while Paul essentially pretends to be her during the date. Ellie and Aster really hit it off, and Paul often seems to be third wheeling his own relationship, but ultimately it is his relationship and not Ellie's. It's complicated and emotionally confusing and honestly a little ridiculous, and a lesser script would have bumbled it entirely, making it too funny to take seriously or so overtly serious that it becomes a parody of itself. But The Half of It hits that elusive perfect middle ground. As I alluded to before, this core plot doesn't really matter all that much on its own, and it's very clearly doomed to fail. What really matters, though, is the relationships these characters form, and how they shape each other.

The main characters in The Half of It are all loveable people in their own right, fleshed out and smart in their own ways but also realistically flawed. Aster Flores is beautiful and creative, but tends to hide in her own world of art and philosophy in order to escape the endless tedium of her life. Paul Munsky seems like a typical unintelligent jock at first, but he's very intelligent and passionate in his own way, he's just very bad at communicating. Ellie Chu seems cold and abrasive, but really she's just incredibly lonely, and feels trapped in the home town she hates.

Without spoiling much, the way these characters interact with each other and shape their futures is absolutely beautiful to watch. For all the deceit, these are legitimately kind people who care about each other very much. Director Alice Wu resists the urge to spell things out for us, showing us the characters lives and personalities and letting us infer the connection between the two instead. When we see Paul's house full of arguing siblings and parents, we begin to understand why he has such a hard time speaking. When we see Aster Flores' completely passionless relationship with her current boyfriend and family, we see why she is so closed off. When we see Ellie Chu's love for her down-on-his-luck father combined with her frustration at the small town she lives in, we understand why she feels so lonely and hopeless. It all gets to the core of high school life; that while the melodrama and petty antics seem like the most important thing in the world at the time, what will really matter when all is said and done is the people that you met and developed relationships with, and how that all shaped who you would eventually become.

There are a lot of philosphical quotes sprinkled throughout the half of it. It seems pretentious on the surface, but it really does feel typical of how an artistic, philosophy-minded teenager would see and interact with the world. One recurring theme is about how "Hell is other people," reflected with the undertones that hell is usually of one's own making. In high school, especially when one is beginning to grow tired of their home town, this can feel true. But the opposite is also true; the relationship we form with others can be our key to salvation, and help us to grow out of our personal hells and into the best versions of ourselves.