Film Review: The Half Of It

I really hope it doesn’t take writer/director, Alice Wu, another 16 years to make another feature because her latest film, which was just released on Netflix, is absolutely wonderful. It’s called The Half Of It, and the story is essentially a contemporary, teen-centered riff on Edmond Rostand’s classic play Cyrano de Bergerac. The film follows Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a lonely, shy, and kinda awkward high schooler who lives with her widowed father, Edwin (Collin Chou), in the small, fairly conservative, dead-end town of Squahamish. At school she has a side hustle where she writes her classmates’ papers for a fee.

One day, a boy comes up to her, Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer). He’s a player on the football team, who clearly isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He asks Ellie to help him writing a love letter to one Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire). She initially rejects the idea, but some financial troubles eventually lead her into accepting Paul’s offer. Ellie starts writing letters on behalf of Paul to Aster, which soon begins to take an unintended effect. Not only do Ellie and Paul begin to form an unlikely friendship, Ellie also finds herself developing feelings for Aster, which starts complicating things.

If you’ve seen any number of the Netflix teen movies, you have a fairly basic idea of what to expect, especially tonally. They’re often broad, plucky, quirky, and oh so earnest. While The Half Of It does share some of those qualities, it is by and large a very understated film that takes a more mature approach to the themes that are often explored in the genre. It’s easily one of the biggest strengths of the film, and the way Alice Wu delicately handles her characters really caught me by surprise, and it won me over really quickly.

While the initial setup feels like a classic rom-com formula, the film reveals itself to be less concerned in being a love story, and more about the nature of love, and more importantly, coming to terms with who you are, and being comfortable in your own skin. As such, it manages to avoid the toxicity that usually comes with these kinds of stories where someone is manipulated into falling in love. The heart of the film ends up being the bond that is formed between Ellie and Paul as they get to know more and more about each other, and getting more involved in each other’s lives. It’s incredibly sweet and pure, and the way it gets you invested in their journey feels so effortless.

What Wu captures so well here is the sense of isolation that Ellie feels. Not only is she struggling to come to terms with her queer identity in a conservative town, but she’s also suffocating in a town that offers no real future for her, or really anyone for that matter. With merely a few establishing shots, and lingering moments on the mundane day-to-day happenings, it paints a very stark and believable picture of what it’s like living in a place like Squahamish.

As the love triangle forms, the film certainly indulges in a couple well work tropes, but there is enough nuance in display to make it feel like a natural progression of the story and the characters. Even an abrupt moment that kicks off the obligatory “now everyone is sad and no longer talking to each other” sequence feels rooted in character. And the cast does a wonderful job at breathing life into characters who would have just felt like basic archetypes in lesser hands. Lewis and Diemer are both terrific especially terrific in dramatizing their ever-changing dynamic.

I really adored The Half Of It. I was charmed by the characters, and I really found myself invested in their quiet and internal journeys of self-discovery. Alice Wu’s filmmaking here is confident, warm, and totally in tune with the feelings of the characters and their sense of longing. The dreamy cinematography from Greta Zozula, evocative soundtrack choices, and moody score courtesy of Anton Sanko all work to help give the film a lush and lived-in aesthetic that compliments the intimate nature of the story. It might seem like a fairly unassuming, little picture, but it’s wonderful on practically all fronts, delivering everything you would want from a story like this, but in a way that is surprising, patient, and achingly human.