The Half of It: Ambitious Teen Comedy Mines Sweet Spot Between Love and Identity
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
The new Netflix teen comedy The Half of It — about a Chinese American small town high-school senior named Ellie who is struggling with her sexual identity — is, as they say, a lot.
A lot of John Hughes eighties' high-school drama, a dollop of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano De Bergerac, a smattering of Wes Anderson quirk, and a progressive measure of positive Asian and LGBTQ representation. Not to mention vintage movie references and a dusting of quotes from Plato, about the soul's search for its other half, and Jean-Paul Sartre on free will.
Presumably, director Alice Wu has been saving things up. The Half of It is only her second feature, after 2004's Saving Face. Her new movie, which recently won the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature at the cancelled Tribeca Film Festival, is both scattered and ambitious. The same could be said of its self-confident teen protagonist Ellie (Leah Lewis), a husky-voiced, diminutive bespectacled high-school senior, and apparently the only Asian student in the small fictional town of Squahamish.
Ellie lives with her widowed father, a former PhD in engineering who, because of his poor English, works as the station master at a depot that has only two trains a day. He spends his days mooning over old movies on the TV (Casablanca, Wings of Desire, His Girl Friday) as Ellie helps pay the bills by ghost-writing essays for half the senior class. The empathetic home-room teacher (Becky Ann Baker) is relaxed about the scam, but eager to see Ellie get away to college and, personally and intellectually, realize her potential.
Life gets complicated when the inarticulate but romantic jock Paul (Daniel Diemer) hires Ellie to write some love letters for him. He has a crush on the beatific pastor's daughter, Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire) who is dating the school's big man on campus and all-around doofus, Trig (Wolfgang Novogratz).
Ellie takes the writing gig because she has been crushing on Aster as well. She starts sending the girl increasingly heartfelt texts, ostensibly from Paul. To her delight, she discovers Aster is as complex and sensitive a soul as herself. Why she's dating a character as stereotypically obtuse as Trig doesn't really make much sense, but let's assume it's a small town and the two best-looking couple are obliged to pair up.
Still, Aster is obviously restless enough to be intrigued by the romantic texts, though she's understandably bewildered by the difference between the high-flown writing and the underwhelming real-life Paul. Perhaps she has suspicions. Certainly, she bestows enough attention on the outcast Ellie to give the girl heart-flutters and hope.
Early in The Half of It, Ellie declares in voice-over that no one will get what they want in the story, setting us up to expect the unexpected —and in its way, the movie half-delivers. The script is over-stuffed with plot digressions, and it doesn't avoid the twin pitfalls of indie films: the twee and preachy. But at its best moments, it provides a warm contemporary take on intergender friendships and almost lives up to its philosophical pretensions.
As the teen characters emerge from the comfortable prisons of their roles — the nerd, the jock, the popular girl — they learn that they're not, contrary to Plato, destined to find their soul mates, but are, to cite Sartre, condemned to freedom.
The Half of It. Written and directed by Alice Wu. Starring Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire, Wolfgang Novogratz, Becky Ann Baker and Collin Chou. Now streaming on Netflix.