The Half of It (2020)
Directed by Alice Wu
Shy, straight-A student Ellie is hired by sweet but inarticulate jock Paul, who needs help wooing the most popular girl in school. But their new and unlikely friendship gets tricky when Ellie discovers she has feelings for the same girl.
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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.
When writing the letter, Ellie takes a shortcut by stealing a line from Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”.
Wu finds ways to spin it positively, though, including a scene where Ellie goes to a classmate’s party and is greeted with the legitimately welcoming yell of “The Chinese girl came!” There’s no sense of artificiality here even as Wu peppers Ellie’s daily life with atypical pop culture references including movies (from Wings of Desire to His Girl Friday ), music (from artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Chicago), and even philosophers (from Camus to Plato).
Ellie, who is herself secretly attracted to Aster, reluctantly pens a message in which she lifts a line from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire .
For one of Paul’s texts, Ellie cribs a line about emotional yearning from Wings of Desire, the film she watches on TV with her dad.
It turns out that Aster is a misfit hipster in prom-queen clothing — your kids might say she’s an Extra disguised as a Basic — and can recognize a line of dialogue from the Wim Wenders classic “Wings of Desire” when it’s dropped into a love letter.
Though it may be compared to Sierra Burgess is a Loser for adapting the same story or To All the Boys I've Loved Before for having an Asian-American lead, The Half of It sets itself apart as a uniquely touching story of young love and self-realization.
Taken alongside Always Be My Maybe and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Half of It is another data point in favor of Netflix bankrolling quirky Asian-American romantic comedies.
As Netflix did so successfully with their smash-hit teen flick To All the Boys I've Loved Before (and its recent sequel), The Half of It mixes things up by casting an Asian-American actress in the lead – in this case, the quietly charismatic Leah Lewis – but takes things further by making its protagonist gay.
With its plucky teen protagonist and engaging storytelling, “The Half of It” is sure to hit big with Netflix viewers who made 2018’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” one of the platform’s most popular original films (and spawned a franchise in the process).
Focusing largely on Chinese-American teen Ellie (Leah Lewis), who is enlisted by jock Paul (Daniel Diemer) to pen a love letter to his crush, Aster (Alexxis Lemire), at first blush The Half of It seems as though it’s heading for To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before territory.
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.
Wu finds ways to spin it positively, though, including a scene where Ellie goes to a classmate’s party and is greeted with the legitimately welcoming yell of “The Chinese girl came!” There’s no sense of artificiality here even as Wu peppers Ellie’s daily life with atypical pop culture references including movies (from Wings of Desire to His Girl Friday ), music (from artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Chicago), and even philosophers (from Camus to Plato).
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.
Philosophical by nature and culturally literate (it quotes Plato and Oscar Wilde and features films like His Girl Friday and Casablanca ), The Half of It pitches itself at youthful, and not so youthful, romantics who know or suspect that love doesn't come easy, and can handle a half-happy ending.
Understated scenes where they watch classic movies like His Girl Friday and Casablanca together are most moving.
As if it’s isn’t enough to have such an intelligent pairing that includes odes to Casablanca , The Philadelphia Story , and references to Sartre, Camus, and even Powell’s Books, there’s also another tender platonic love story in the growing friendship between Ellie and Paul, who could’ve easily come off as a dumb jock stereotype if he weren’t so tenderly written and played with sweet intensity by Diemer.
The specter of those films is balanced by the classic movies (including “Casablanca,” “The Philadelphia Story” and “Wings of Desire”) Ellie watches with her father that cast a thematic glow over the proceedings.
That’s how it starts, cribbing sentiments from the old film romances (“Casablanca,” “Wings of Desire,” “The Philadelphia Story”) her dad watches, nonstop.
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Like his seminal coming-of-age masterpiece The Graduate — which this movie explicitly references — or the hilarious The Birdcage, The Half of It brings the story and characters to the line of absurdity but never crosses it.
From 1984’s Electric Dreams to Netflix’s embarrassingly bad rom-com Sierra Burgess Is a Loser , a lot of projects borrowed from Cyrano .
But Wu has no pretensions of an adaptation or even update (the best of which remains Steve Martin’s “Roxanne”).
The premise isn’t terribly original — yet another comic takeoff on the Cyrano de Bergerac formula mined by so many others including Steve Martin’s brilliant Roxanne.
Every generation gets its own “Cyrano de Bergerac,” from the Steve Martin comedy “Roxanne” to Netflix’s “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser.”
And, in a diversion from the accepted Bergerac plot (also updated in pics like 1987 Steve Martin vehicle Roxanne ), Paul is a more sympathetic, less cruel character than expected, and he naturally falls for Ellie himself, in the most awkward and human of fashions.
In a lovely update on Edmond Rostand’s late 19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac” (arguably best known for Steve Martin’s 1987 film version, “Roxanne” – although this version ditches the big nose), Ellie sends poignant letters and text messages to beautiful Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire) on behalf of hapless but sweet-natured Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer).
Hace dieciséis años se estrenó la ópera prima de Alice Wu, “Saving Face” una pieza innovadora de cine LGBT, particularmente en la comunidad asiática.
It’s emotional intelligence without a hint of the saccharine, which has already become something of a signature for Alice Wu, in spite of having directed only one other film, the groundbreaking 2004 lesbian rom-com Saving Face .
The directing is so assured it’s a wonder to discover Wu has not made a film since 2004’s “Saving Face,” a drama about homophobia in the Chinese-American community.
The Half of It is only her second feature, after 2004's Saving Face.
For some inexplicable reason, a whole fifteen years has passed between Alice Wu’s directorial debut (Saving Face – a bold and excellent indie which everyone should seek out straight away) and her follow up film, The Half of It, released on Netflix last week.
Back in 2004, Alice Wu’s Saving Face was a rare lesbian romance from the perspective of an Asian-American.
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The film heavily mirrors that of the classic Cyrano de Bergerac , but its characters are more modernized versions of those presented in Can’t Hardly Wait .
Ellie doesn’t just live on the wrong side of the tracks, she lives on the tracks, since her depressive immigrant father (Edwin Chu, channeling Harry Dean Stanton in “Pretty in Pink”), works as the stationmaster.