Film Views: “The Half of It”

It seems every generation since the post-World War II era has a “high school movie” that captures something unique about the experience. For my generation, it was probably The Breakfast Club — though I would quickly rope in Fast Times At Ridgemont High as a film with a slightly more authentic depiction. Both movies, while good to very good, had to accomplish two things: sell a fantasy but also tell a story an audience could relate to. So for every moment that rang true in those films, there were other moments/scenes that were ginned up for comedic effect or to inject some action/danger into the story. This is a roundabout way of saying that while there’s no shortage of high school movies, there are only a few filmmakers who seem to get it right.

Alice Wu is one of those rare filmmakers who has gotten it right in The Half of It that’s currently streaming on Netflix. Although the movie has many highly stylized scenes, there’s an authenticity that’s at play in a story that combines Cyrano de Bergerac with a more fluid exploration of sexuality and the intersections of ethnicity, marginality, and friendship in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The story centers on Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), an Asian-American high school senior where she’s the only girl with her ethnic background in her town. Most of the kids at Ellie’s school are white. There are some who bully her, and there are some who rely on her smarts to write school papers for them (she charges $20 per paper). Mostly, though, Ellie is a loner. She watches her society from the margins, lives at home with her widowed father, and generally stays on her side of the invisible boundaries that reinforce her outsider status.

One day, Ellie’s father forgot to pay the electricity bill. Faced with a power shut off, Ellie grudgingly accepts an offer from fellow student Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer) to write a love letter to another student, Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire). Paul says he’ll pay Ellie $50 to write the note — which is how much she needs to turn the power back on at her home. What starts as write for hire scheme to get a guy a date, slowly turns into a longer-term courtship between these two girls — one of whom thinks the letters and texts are coming from Paul.

Through the course of the movie, Ellie and Paul start to become friends, but Ellie’s guard always seems to be up when she’s around him because, though he’s inarticulate and sometimes a bit thick in the head, she doesn’t want to tip her hand that she’s falling in love with Aster — who also happens to be the daughter of the town’s preacher. See? It’s complicated. Add to that the pressures of conformity in high school, the pressures of conformity in a small town, and the pressures of conformity regarding sexual norms, and we see many of the external factors that keep Ellie from acting on her desires. Internally, however, it’s not much better. Ellie is struggling with the death of her mother, and the reality that her father’s work limitations will keep her trapped in her small town socially isolated, emotionally lonely, and intellectually stifled.

While the film is being touted for taking on lesbian sexuality with an Asian-American female at the center of it, The Half of It is much more than that. While it’s clear that Ellie has a deep crush on Aster, she’s not entirely comfortable with her feelings — probably because she’s never been in love in that way with another person. And while Aster feels stuck with her rich boyfriend Trig Carson (Wolfgang Novogratz), she longs to develop her talents as a painter. Feeling seen by Ellie (posing as Paul) for her love of art and literature, Aster does fall in love — but it’s not necessarily with another person. Rather she’s falling in love with the messiness of life and how it’s more of an inspiring and engaging existence than sitting in church listening about love from Bible verse, or watching her boyfriend doing meaningless activities like spinning his pickup wheels in the mud while people cheer him on. And what of Paul? While his feelings for Aster are based on how she’s pretty and smells like “freshly ground flour,” he finds out that his talents for saving the family sausage business entail the fusion of ethnic styles to create something new (Taco Sausage — “two-hand foods, one great taste”). It’s played for comedic effect, but while Paul’s family is loud, chaotic, and close to losing their livelihoods, his rather simple scheme to alter their grandmother’s sausage recipe to compliment a taco shell turns out to be a stroke of brilliance — although his family doesn’t know it yet. What spurs Paul to continue his passion is his friendship with Ellie. But Paul and Ellie’s father grow to like each other as well during the course of the film, and Ellie’s dad comes to accept Paul as a kind of member of the family.

So, yes, The Half of It is a love story, but as the tagline to the film’s poster says, it’s a different kind of love story. Some of those differences play out in ways highlighted above, but the kind of love between Ellie and Aster isn’t so clear cut — and neither is the love between Ellie and Paul. One of the ways that filmmaker Alice Wu makes this clear is the use of double yellow lines painted down the middle of a street. Ellie is often seen riding her bicycle from school to home. She usually stays in a narrow bike lane while Paul runs behind her or at her side — and usually on the opposite side of the road. The one time she does ride on the other side of the road, she’s taunted by local high school idiots as they pass by in a pickup truck. Ellie has developed a strong armor to protect her from the daily insults, but Paul steps up to challenge them. For the first time, she’s on Paul’s side of the road and understands what it’s like when a friend has your back. That shocks her because up to this point, she’s convinced that no one ever notices her or cares about her feelings.

The use of the double yellow line is also used for good symbolic effect when Ellie and Aster venture out to Aster’s “secret spot” (a hot spring in the forest). Aster is driving, and as the two of them leave their small town (and presumably the internal and external pressures that make them conform to what their society expects of them), we see that the double yellow lines down the road are no longer there. It’s only until the last act when Wu makes use of the double yellow lines to illustrate the boundaries between Ellie and Aster fully understanding each other. Details like that (and many others I’ll leave for viewers to notice) are what make The Half of It such a rich and wonderful viewing experience. The story may be derivative at times, but considering how well-worn the high school drama is at this point in time, it’s difficult — even for a skilled filmmaker like Wu — to completely avoid the trappings of its overused narrative devices.