Turtles All the Way Down | John Green’s film review at Max

In a scene halfway through Turtles All the Way Down, teenage protagonist Aza Holmes (ISabela Merced) is in his room exchanging messages with his childhood crush Davis (Felix Mallard), right after a gives you idyllic in the boy’s mansion. When the conversation heats up a little (remembering the girl’s embarrassment when the two decided to take a dip in the pool), he assures her that “you really like your body”), Merced lets a perfectly calculated flash of surprise and excitement cross her face, sitting up in bed with her eyes shining as they stay glued to her cell phone, and typing with a smile on her face an equally cheeky response – but also within the soft rating of the film, of course.

It’s perhaps the film’s best moment, a beacon of identification teen slightly subversive film planted in the midst of the therapeutic tragicomedy woven by John Greenand it’s all Merced’s fault (excellent throughout the film) and the director Hannah Marks. Formerly known as an actress (Awkward, Dirk Gently, etc.), Marks reaches his fourth feature film exhibiting sharp stylistic strength. An easy example: in the book, Aza’s Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder manifests itself in paranoid spirals that slip into the stream of consciousness. In the film, Marks joins forces with the automaker Andrea Bottigliero (Sierra Burgess is a Loser) to translate these tangential escapes tinged with fear into sudden insertions of images of microbes and bacteria in the middle of the performances.

It’s a shortcut that may seem easy, but it fits well within the simulacrum of adolescence. hipster which Marks constructs and deconstructs here. Her central thesis is that Aza is not the only one who, lost in perpetual social maladjustment in the face of the difficulties imposed by OCD, struggles to find her place in the world and to convince those around her that yes, everything is fine, she knows how to be cool. The dynamic between the protagonist and her best friend, Daisy (Cree, an infallible source of charisma and energy when the film needs it most) is clumsy nerdiness; her relationship with Davis is built on shared trauma; with mother (Judy Reyes) she has shy encounters and disagreements, and with the therapist (Poorna Jagannathan) rigid dialectical confrontations, colored by resentment.

Turtles All the Way Down, in short, is the story of lives based on an irrational fear of revealing themselves to be imperfect, of “losing their pose” – and, also, of how the owners of these lives rediscover the idea that the love they feel for each other is enough to overlook (at least for now) these imperfections. Some of this was already in Green’s book, no doubt, and some more is due to the work of the screenwriters Isaac Aptaker It is Elizabeth Berger (series duo This is Us), who choose well when to prune the author’s idiosyncrasies to translate him into something unconverted, or when these idiosyncrasies work in favor of the film’s slightly off-kilter charm.

But who holds this narrative at their fingertips, who prevents it from giving in to artificial corniness, a somewhat pathetic attempt to play a detective thriller, cheap moralization about mental health – in short, all the traps that are inherent in the drama teen -, it’s Hanhah Marks. In the hands of the director, this is a world that seems believable, that maintains not only the authenticity of its very personal narrative about OCD, but also that finds its utopian romanticism from a path that does not seem built to reach it. If, for Green, love is “both how and why“we become who we are, this adaptation of Turtles All the Way Down hits the nail on the head by dismissing with a wave of the hand the perfumery of the subgenre in which he moves.

Instead of worrying about this, the film is busy looking for evidence of this love that Green talks about within the relationships he builds, and making them explicit with equal doses of tenderness and assertiveness – giving them a form, in short, that not even its protagonist, absorbed in paranoid spirals about microbes and bacteria, would be able to ignore it.