Having cut through against the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu in a small part in the pole-dancing drama Hustlers, she is also highly effective here. Reinhart is genuinely beguiling as Grace. Bumblingly, figuring it out as he goes, Henry pushes into unknown territory. Traditionally it’s the girls who pine for the difficult/damaged hero in romances, but writers Richard Tanne (who also directs) and Krystal Sutherland neatly and successfully flip the formula, loading all the darkness onto the blonde Grace, while Henry bubbles and flaps around at the edges wondering how he’s going to make his mark with this mysterious and possibly dangerous new arrival.
And that’s the setup – the geek fighting not just for the hand of fair lady, but against an impossible rival, a dead one whose lustre has only been polished by his absence. Grace walks with a limp, a result of the car accident that killed the love of her life, a clever, handsome, sporty intellectual against whom Henry will never measure up. Dropping into his world one day like an alien from outer space is Grace, a spiky, withdrawn, slightly sneery girl who’s smart, bookish and into the love poems of Pablo Neruda. Shorter term his ambition stretches to editing the school paper. Henry is the nerdy high school kid whose long-term goal is to be a writer.
#Henry page chemical hearts movie
If there’s room each year for one gorgeous indie teenage love movie then this is the 500 Days of Summer of 2020. It’s also a feeling generated by this deliciously gooey romance. Yet the evanescence of their time together doesn’t make it any less meaningful, to them or to us.Love is a feeling generated by chemicals in the brain, suggests Suds, the practical, science-versed older sister of Henry, in Chemical Hearts. Grace and Henry are both cerebral, thoughtful kids, which, in teenage terms, means they’re perfect for one another-for now. But what does a happy ending mean, really, when you’re 17 or 18? For most of us, that age-and the smudge of time before and after-constitutes a permanent state of impermanence. Part of the movie’s appeal is that it dwells in the realm of the imperfect: so many teen romances depend on a happy ending. Tanne-who previously made the charming romance Southside with You, based on the early courtship of Barack and Michelle Obama-approaches the material without condescending to it, even as he acknowledges that teenage love always feels much larger than life. 21, from being almost embarrassingly enjoyable. But that doesn’t keep Chemical Hearts, which debuts on Amazon Prime Aug. Painful secrets, it’s true, are a dime a dozen. This highly annoying maneuver pays off: The two segue into a tentative romance, though Grace harbors a painful secret that threatens their future.Ĭourtesy of Amazon Studios-Courtesy of Amazon Studios They meet as Henry looks over her shoulder, reading the line from a Pablo Neruda poem she’s highlighted. Enter Grace Town (Lili Reinhart, of Riverdale), a bristly, brainy transfer student who walks with the aid of a cane. Aspiring writer Henry Page (played by the raffishly appealing Austin Abrams) is just starting his senior year of high school and waiting for his life to begin. As a character in the romantic melodrama Chemical Hearts puts it, the teenage years are an unavoidable limbo between childhood and adulthood: “Adults are just scarred kids who were lucky to make it out of limbo alive.”Ĭhemical Hearts, directed by Richard Tanne and adapted from Krystal Sutherland’s young adult novel, invites you to relive the trauma of teen romance, and don’t be surprised if you get sucked right in. In troubling times, it sometimes helps to look back on even more troubling times.
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