Cute couple saves 'Everything' despite problematic screenplay
In the romantic teen fantasy “Everything, Everything,” main characters succumb to a dreaded Hollywood disease known as Kristen Stewart Acting Syndrome.
This nasty malady causes actors to constantly punctuate their dialogue with audible nasal exhalations, muffled snorts and breathy, nonverbal vocalizations.
Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) comes down with it first.
She's 18. She suffers from SCID (Severe Combined Immunodeficiency), often called “bubble boy disease,” named for David Vetter, a boy who lived for 12 years in a germ-free bubble. (John Travolta popularized him in the 1976 TV movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”)
Next, Olly (Nick Robinson) falls victim to the acting syndrome.
He's a New York teen who has just moved next door to Maddy's Massachusetts home, a hermetically sealed environment with huge windows so she can observe an outside world she can never enter, for fear of contracting a fatal virus or germ.
Maddy's mother Pauline (Anika Noni Rose) musters the most resistance to Stewart Syndrome. She's a successful doctor, which explains how she affords the expensive, elaborate house and sterilization equipment to ensure her daughter's safety.
Olly falls madly for Maddy.
They trade text messages. But instead of employing the tiresome cliché of typing texts on the screen, director Stella Meghie - working from J. Mills Goodloe's screenplay based on Nicola Yoon's novel - has Maddy cleverly imagine she and Olly are together in a face-to-face conversation.
Pauline, a protective mother (her husband died in a car wreck), has no idea that Olly and Maddy have actually been in the same room together. She's unaware her daughter is willing to risk everything to experience real life outside of her expensive bubble.
Maddy's daytime nurse for 15 years, Carla (Ana de la Reguera), arranges her first meeting with Olly, realizing how much the teenage student yearns to be with the ultra-cute guy.
Unencumbered by financial restraints, Maddy and Olly apparently can own any phone, any size Apple computer screen, or new Toyota pickup truck they want. They even escape to Hawaii (Maddy secures a credit card for the tickets) without photo IDs such as driver's licenses, which Maddy doesn't have.
Mostly, I call “Everything, Everything” a fantasy because Mom, after realizing the couple has spent the night together, never even bothers to ask Maddy if she had sex.
Stenberg and Robinson make an adorable couple, emanating the awkward bliss of first romance.
Robinson gives Olly an underlying dark edge, no doubt fostered by the abusive man living with his mother.
Stenberg - remember her as Rue in “The Hunger Games”? - is as transparent as the glass separating Maddy from the world. The camera loves Stenberg's face, an expressive canvas of emotions and thoughts as easily read as those text messages.
Maddy and Olly's first kiss occurs on July 4, just as fireworks go off.
It's a visually underwhelming metaphorical moment, one much better staged in Alfred Hitchcock's “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
But then again, they didn't suffer from Kristen Stewart Acting Syndrome either.
“Everything, Everything”
★ ★
Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera
Directed by: Stella Meghie
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations. 96 minutes