52 Time May 11, 2020
REVIEW
The Half of It is alive
to more than romance
By Stephanie Zacharek
Because humans spend so much energy in pursuiT of
romance, we sometimes forget that platonic relationships
can be even more complicated—and generally last longer too.
That’s just one of the ideas thrumming beneath the surface
of writer-director Alice Wu’s The Half of It, a prickly-tender
film about teenage friendship, first love and all the blurry
gradations in between. It’s sweet and funny, but also, in
places, as raw as a scraped knee.
Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) is a straight-A student living in a
dull town in the Pacific Northwest. She has a great, dry wit,
but she doesn’t really have any friends, maybe because she’s
managing so much anxiety at home: her father (Collin Chou)
earned an advanced engineering degree in China, but in the
States, where he moved his family when Ellie was small, his
imperfect English has held him back. He’s also, it seems, still
numb with grief—his wife, Ellie’s mother, is dead, and he
spends his days watching movies like Casablanca and His
Girl Friday as a way of improving his English, though it’s clear
they simply give him solace.
Ellie holds together this little family of two, writing
papers for her fellow students at $20 a pop. “It’s an A or you
don’t pay” is her motto. She’s so good at this academic sleight
of hand that a classmate she barely knows, Paul Munsky
(Daniel Diemer), a charming but awkward jock who works
part time in his family’s sausage business, approaches her
to write a love letter for him, Cyrano de Bergerac–style. The
object of his affection is the prettiest and nicest girl in school,
Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), a deacon’s daughter who’s
sensitive and bookish, with a flair for art.
The complication is that Ellie herself
has a crush on Aster. She at first refuses
to help Paul, but relents when she needs
$50 to pay the electricity bill her father
has neglected. The letters she writes
under Paul’s name—augmented by a se-
ries of ghostwritten text messages—are
so effective that they almost get him
what he wants, though they also expose
his own underlying insecurities.What’s Wonderful about The
Half of It is the way it respects everyone’s
insecurities, without letting its
characters get away with their biases.
Ellie feels like an outsider, perhaps not
so much because she’s a person of color
in a mostly white town but because she’s
so much smarter than everyone else—
and also happens to be gay. She and
Aster, through those letters and texts
ostensibly written by Paul, connect over
art and books. But Aster, so lovely that
you can’t imagine she’d have a care in the
world, reveals that because of how the
world perceives her, she feels lumped
into a group where she doesn’t belong:
“I’m like a lot of people— which makes
me kind of no one.”
That line, perceptive and alive, is
typical of The Half of It. This is Wu’s
second film: her first, worth seeking
out, is the 2004 Saving Face, about
a young Chinese-American woman
(Michelle Krusiec) trying to navigate
her closeted love life, even as her
extremely homophobic mother (Joan
Chen) reveals, at age 48, that she’s
pregnant, with the father nowhere in
sight. The plot mechanics of The Half
of It creak a little; once in a while, a
scene raises more questions than it
answers. But the movie is so vital that
that doesn’t matter much, and its young
actors hit every delicate beat perfectly.
When you’re young and you long to
be in love, friendship somehow seems
like less, even when it may be more. Yet
there’s no denying that love triangles
hurt like hell. Why do you think their
points are shaped like arrows?THE HALF OF IT streams May 1 on Netflix◁
Lewis and Diemer: it feels like love—or is it
really just the best kind of friendship?TimeOff Movies
‘I used to
think there
was only
one way to
love ... Now
that I’m older,
I see there
are more.’
ALICE WU,
in her director’s
statement