I had high hopes for this movie, I really did. There was just so much potential for a good teen movie. It’s an adaptation of a best-selling YA novel by Jennifer Niven, said writer actually co-wrote the screenplay, we have Elle Fanning (Violet) and Justice Smith (Finch) as the leads – where did it all go wrong?
Mind you, I didn’t expect the most realistic teen experience to ever grace the screen. After all, teen movies like The Fault in Our Stars have characters like Augustus Waters, the kind of young person who places a cigarette between his lips and calls it a metaphor. No teen I know speaks like that, banters like that; some of them don’t even know what a metaphor is. So yes, I am not expecting absolute realism. My main issue with All the Bright Places is how inorganic it feels.
Why do Violet and Finch like each other? I couldn’t tell you, I know next to nothing about either of them. They meet at a bridge, near the place where Violet’s sister died in a car accident. Violet is standing on the ledge of said bridge, and Finch happens to be running past. He talks her down from the ledge and from that moment on, he takes a liking to her. She is more resistant to his charms, but he wears her down over time.
What is the basis of their relationship? Is it this shared encounter at a space of death? Is it the fact that she is all the colours in one, at full brightness? (That’s a quote from the movie by the way). Their conversations together certainly don’t hold any brightness, Fanning and Smith try their hardest but there just isn’t any sort of spark. So when they kiss, or have sex, there isn’t a natural lead-up to these events. It feels scripted and, you guessed it, inorganic.
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The whole premise of “bright places” (as seen from the title) comes about because the two have to do a geography project together, which involves traveling to wonders in Indiana and writing about these spaces. Violet and Finch call these trips ‘wanders’ (or maybe their geography teacher does), and the whole point of these wanders is to find brightness even in the most mundane and ordinary of spaces. Because it’s never about the place, it’s the person you’re with that brings the light.
There are a handful of cute moments, mainly during the small roller-coaster wander, where the two are quite high-spirited. However, most of the moments are so sombre and serious. The cinematography, while beautiful, coats the film with the yellow of autumn – a season where things head towards death. I know that Violet is grieving and Finch has dark problems of his own, but the movie is supposed to show me that this relationship is special, that it helps negate, even in a very small way, the darkness that inundates their lives.
Instead, all we get is a very dull relationship, due in part to shallow characterisation. Who is Violet outside of her grief? I know she is a writer who loves her sister, but I never get a glimpse of this writer or a deeper sense of that sisterly love. Who is Finch outside of his struggles with mental health? There is much ambiguity as to what exactly he is struggling with, but because we don’t know, a lot of his actions are just unfathomable to us. Maybe that’s the point the movie wishes to make about mental health struggles, that a lot of the time it’s just swimming in layers of not knowing.
If that’s the case, they should try to communicate his interior world to us a little better. All we get is a scene of him messing up his post-its and painting his wall. Because we don’t understand, the twist we get later in the film just feels contrived, a cheap way to make us weep – it’s also not handled very responsibly, given the contentious issues the film explores. And I didn’t cry, simply because I wasn’t invested. The worst part is, I wanted to care, I wanted to feel something for these characters.
Ultimately, Violet and Finch never attain a living, breathing quality that moves beyond the page on which they were conceived, and that, my friends, is dark stuff indeed.
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