Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Director: Ry Russo-Young
Quick Impressions:
My daughter loves Nicola Yoon’s YA novel The Sun is Also a Star. Yes, she’s only ten, and the novel has a lot of profanity, but so does the fourth grade. (She was just telling me on the drive to the theater that the boys try to get away with saying the F word by leaving out the “u” which can’t possibly be satisfying, though apparently it does annoy the teacher.)
She actually got the book from the Easter Bunny (who, I like to imagine, chose a familiar title from a limited selection while in a bit of a time crunch), and she devoured it faster than she finished the candy (seriously, although the Easter Bunny also went a bit overboard in that department. Possibly, like me, he’s not great at making choices when the clock is ticking. I imagine his rush to fill all the baskets on time is a little bit like my sister’s favorite 90s game show sensation Supermarket Sweep.)
But even though my daughter is still a bit puzzled about why she received five different types of chocolate bunnies, the book was a big hit. “I’m so excited for you to see this,” she kept saying on the way to the theater. “It’s such a great story.”
I knew she would be disappointed. My husband knew, too. Remember what it was like to be young, to believe that a movie adaptation of your favorite novel would bear any semblance whatsoever to the book? (I will never forget my baffled thirteen-year-old outrage when the Robert Taylor/Elizabeth Taylor (no-relation) Ivanhoe included a scene of Rebecca disguising herself as a boy and running away with her mother’s jewels. “Where did they even get that?” I raved. Then a few years later, I read The Merchant of Venice, and I suddenly realized that as far as 1950s Hollywood was concerned, all female Jewish characters from literature were completely interchangeable. (If you’re looking for a passable adaptation of Ivanhoe, by the way, the 1982 TV movie is less horrible.))
My sons did not share their sister’s desire to see this film. (And, honestly, my husband only wanted to see how mad my daughter would get when they inevitably messed up the book.) So we went as a mother-daughter bonding activity which was kind of nice.
“I’m tall, right?” my daughter said apprehensively as I parked. “Do you think people will assume I’m a teen? They won’t think I’m too young to have read the book, will they? They won’t know I’m ten?”
“Honestly,” I told her, “a lot of young adult novels are read by kids who are like 10, 11, 12, and curious and excited about being a teenager.” I’m positive that’s true. I remember vividly being dragged to the thrift store when I was about her age, buying a bunch of Sweet Valley High books, and reading them in the car on the way home (or sometimes in the store while my mom and grandma browsed endlessly. I also read Lolita that way, though it took longer. I remember reading the back thinking, “I’m twelve. She’s twelve. I’m sure we’ll have a lot in common.”) By the time I was an actual teenager, I was no longer reading YA. (Who had time?) Of course, I was a teen before Twilight, before the days when YA was code for “popular.”
I do write young adult fiction, so this movie was not an unreasonable choice for me, though if not for my daughter’s oft-stated interest, I would not have gone.
If you’re wondering, neither of us liked the film much. (We both found it disappointing, but I was far less invested.) If you’re a fan of the book, you probably won’t like the movie. But if you’re not a fan of the book, I’m not sure why you’d see the movie. So I’m kind of wondering who this movie is for. (Maybe fans of Riverdale? I just noticed that the male lead Charles Melton is a regular on Riverdale, which we do not watch, though we are fans of its eviller spin-off Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).
We had a good time, though, and a great conversation afterwards. (It’s so fun to talk with her about literary adaptation. She wants to focus on classic films about space this summer, and I’m so excited to start by watching The Forbidden Planet and reading The Tempest!)
The Good:
I went into this movie promising myself to review it kindly since I know I’m not its target audience. I didn’t expect to be blown away by The Sun is Also a Star, but I had no intention of ripping it to shreds. I must say, though, it is considerably worse than I expected, and I honestly do think it’s a failure on its own terms which makes me sad for the author of the novel. (Of course, Nicola Yoon is a phenomenal success, far more successful than I am, so I would probably be better served by feeling sorry for myself.)
When we got home, my daughter read me several lengthy passages, so I can confirm, Yoon’s book is much, much, much better than this movie. From what little I’ve read, in fact, it’s an excellent novel, and I intend to read the rest.
But since this section of the review is labeled “The Good,” I will say that the movie does have good music, which is fortunate because for long stretches, it has nothing but music. Honestly, the whole second half devolves into the characters wandering around vaguely “falling in love” while music plays so we can’t hear anything they’re saying. Seriously.
“All they do is go places that aren’t in the book for no reason, and then you just hear music playing!” my daughter complained in an irate whisper during the movie. “They’re wasting all their time just wandering around the city! They’re not going to have time to put in any of the good stuff!”
“In the book, do they mainly sit and have conversations?” I guessed, then explained, “For a movie, something dynamic has to be happening on screen that the audience can watch.”
“Yes,” she replied in frustration, “but those conversations are really important. Instead of hearing what they’re saying–which is literally what the book is about–we’re just hearing all this random music for no reason. And meanwhile they’re just wandering around aimlessly.”
I agree with her that the movie overdoes it with the “wandering the city set to music” montages. Honestly, imagine reading a really engrossing novel while listening to your playlist, but halfway through, you start to fall asleep, until finally, you’re more aware of the music than the story. That’s a perfect metaphor for the journey of this film.
But I will say this in the movie’s favor. The music is good. Mostly. I genuinely liked the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir (whose Icelandic name is so cool). And I also like the soundtrack (though less than the score). A few times, a song would come on, and I’d think, “Oh yeah! I forgot all about this one! It was on our old family playlist! We used to listen to it in the car all the time!” Now some of it is a bit too mellow for my personal tastes, but overall, it’s very palatable music.
And, in fairness, I must remind myself that material aimed at teens usually contains quite a bit of music. Every show I’ve ever seen on the CW, for example, features about 900 songs per episode.
I actually found the early scenes of the film more compelling and engaging than I expected. Afterwards, my daughter confirmed that the opening narration was taken from the book (which I guessed just from the sound of it). That part’s good. The writing is good. The ideas are nothing new, but they’re profound enough, and you believe that a teen would be discovering them for the first time.
And actually, the central concerns of this story highly appealed to me. I love torturing myself with unanswerable philosophical conundrums about the nature and meaning of life. Just the other night I was complaining to my husband (apropos of nothing) that I’m frustrated by scientists who speculate that our entire world could be a simulation because 1) That’s just Platonism that they’ve suddenly decided is cool enough to discuss because they can put computers in it and 2) It solves nothing because when you get to the next level of reality, all your questions are still unanswered, so is that a simulation, too? And I mean, if there are like 300 layers of simulation before we get to the real reality, then we basically can’t access it from here, so isn’t that just justifying revelation as the only means of truly knowing anything (since empiricism can’t even take us out of this simulation)? (Also, I find the notion that we are a zillion percent more likely to be living in a simulated reality simply because we’ve created simulations ourselves high-handed and annoying.) All my husband did was innocently wake up in the middle of the night, and he got to hear me rave about this and other fun topics for twenty plus minutes.
I am always fascinated by talk about the meaning of life, the possibility of a multiverse, the nature of reality…
This kind of stuff really interests me. I find these characters prime examplars of adolescence. They want to know. They really want to know. You watch and think, “Yes, there’s a truth to this. We’re all just cogs in the machine, and almost nobody looks up, but just for a brief moment, you’re free. When you’re that age, you’re in between places you’re supposed to be. You’ve outgrown your role, and you’re looking for a new place to fit. Maybe it’s the only time you really look around and see things clearly. Or at least, when you are a teenager, you experience life as if you (and possibly only you) are really seeing it for the first time.”
The movie really sold me on this notion that we’re cogs in a machine, that we break out only briefly with the biological imperative to find a new place, make a new life, so we can settle back into mindless routine again. So I love the philosophical bent of the movie.
(I do have some frustrating unanswered questions, though. Why is she wearing a jacket that says DEUS EX MACHINA? Where did she get that? Is it a trendy brand that I don’t know about? (Ever since I watched Hasan Minhaj talk about Supreme, I assume that everything is a trendy brand I don’t know about.) She doesn’t even seem to know what the phrase means, but the jacket is very loud, so she can’t be unaware that she’s wearing the words. Where did she get this jacket? I like to imagine that she picked it up from a random Lost and Found, and it actually belongs to John Leguizamo’s wife (which will make sense when you see the movie) (though not really).
By the way, John Leguizamo is in the movie. Just when I had assumed that the title The Sun is Also a Star was an effort to convince the audience that actual movie stars weren’t needed, there was Leguizamo. I’m always happy to see him. (My daughter was infuriated, though, since apparently the lawyer in the book has a different name, look, and storyline.)
Most other cast members seem to be from TV shows I don’t watch (which is easy since I watch almost nothing). (In fact, just this morning, I read the ending to Game of Thrones since I will never have time to get caught up.)
Yara Shahidi looks perfect as female protagonist Natasha Kingsley. She’s beautiful and seems very comfortable as the character in moments of calm. She usually has little chemistry with Charles Melton who plays her love interest Daniel Bae, which is a shame. For me, Bae is by far the stronger of the two (which is not the actress’s fault. The movie caters to him. Somehow when the book was adapted for the screen, her part of the story got almost totally left out). Bae looks poised to break out as a star here, but it’s a pretty tepid effort. I’m not sure that he’ll quite get there. When he’s positioned like this, you’d think he could manage a little more. But I do think he makes more of an impression than she does.
Probably the most interesting character in the story is Daniel’s black sheep brother Charlie, played by Jake Choi who probably gives the best performance in the movie. I also like Camrus Johnson as Daniel’s friend Omar.
The premise of the story is easy to mock. Natasha and Daniel are not facing commensurate dilemmas. Her family is about to be deported tomorrow. His family wants him to go to Dartmouth. (And he doesn’t want to go to an Ivy League because he wants to write poetry and read philosophy, which confuses me.) But if you are prepared to be charmed by an improbable romance, then the story is fairly winning (until it just kind of stops progressing).
I also found the story behind Daniel’s family’s business and his background in general pretty fascinating. (I had no idea of the Korean/African American hair care connection, and I also loved the scene of young Daniel “choosing” his future career.)
Best Scene:
Best is the scene in which Daniel takes Natasha to his family business. The conflict with his brother here feels extremely real and is very close to the way the events happen in the book. We get genuine tension, and everyone’s behavior seems pretty realistic. All of the characters are engaged in the scene and seem connected to one another. I also kind of like the brief moment when Daniel runs out of his interview. Melton is good here.
Best Scene Visually:
There’s a cute moment when Daniel just can’t seem to make it through a revolving door. It seems like the idea here is to give him a cute teen hearthrob moment. I could see a young Johnny Depp or Robert Downey Jr. doing this bit (better, admittedly, but Melton is reasonably charming).
Also notable are the many bizarre aerial shots of the city that look like they’re filmed by a plane slowwwwwwly going into a barrel role. My daughter hated these. “What was the point of that?” she raged. “Maybe it’s showing that we’re really standing on the side of a round Earth,” I suggested. I do think that’s the idea. It’s intentionally disorienting and extremely distinctive.
The scene of Daniel and his friend looking down at the only person looking up is also good.
Best Action Sequence:
By far, the most memorable scene in this film is what my daughter and I like to call “Coke Can Panting.” You should have seen her face during this signature moment. (It’s for sure my biggest takeaway from this movie. It is destined to become the most iconic scene in the film, like Kevin putting on the aftershave in Home Alone.) Basically Daniel rolls a Coke can over his face again and again while panting heavily and looking tortured. This goes on a really, really, really long time. At the end of the scene, I leaned over to my daughter and whispered slowly in a creepy voice, “Drink Pepsi.” She died.
It should be a surrealist commercial. It should. (I can’t decide if a Coke or Pepsi commercial would be better.) The teen girls sitting at the other end of our row could not stop laughing. I do think the idea here is to present him in all his teen heart-throbby goodness to his admiring teen audience. I mean, there’s a story-driven reason for this moment. He’s been hit in the mouth. He’s using the cold can like ice to reduce the swelling. And he’s reflecting on his tortured dynamic with the controlling parents he respects too much to disobey. But I’m positive that it goes on for so long so all the teenagers can appreciate his brooding sexiness. That’s the idea. But all the teenagers in the theater were laughing hysterically. I don’t think this scene works the way it’s intended. I also think it’s the best part of the movie because…I mean…you won’t soon forget it….
The Negatives:
To be brief, I’ll say the leads have little chemistry, and any narrative tension abruptly stops about halfway into the movie. Natasha’s whole side of the story is catastrophically mishandled. She is being deported tomorrow. Tomorrow. She’s seventeen. She’s lived here nine years. Tomorrow she is being deported. That’s pretty urgent, but I feel no urgency. The story just sort of drifts around to a pleasant, mellow soundtrack. I don’t even feel Natasha’s distress. My daughter says that the character admits she rarely cries. But I’m not getting distress from her at all. I’m getting that she’s annoyed, but I don’t see desperation. At first, we get a hint of this, but as the movie goes on, any nascent, developing sense of urgency just kind of melts away into a vague “who cares?”.
Plus, why is she being deported? Why did the family come there in the first place? Why does she blame her father? Why have they just been flying under the radar for nine years? I told my daughter I wished I knew the answers to these questions. She was like, “The book does explain it!” And then she read me pages and pages of the father’s backstory (full of rich, concrete details), and the details of why he came to ICE’s attention, and why his daughter was mad at him, and the conflict in their relationship, and the fight they get into in front of Daniel (not in the movie). I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Why is this not in the movie?” It’s very bizarre because this material is necessary to understanding the story, and we hear all about Daniel’s family background (which is one aspect of the movie I like).
My daughter was also furious because the book gives us several snippets of narration from the points of view of other random characters.
“They often have to cut out side stories like that for movies,”I said. “It’s easier on screen in like 90 minutes just to present the stories of one or two main characters.”
“Yes,” she said, “but part of the point of the book is that every single person around them is also in the middle of some horrible tragedy, but nobody around them knows it. That’s one of the biggest messages of the book that everybody in the entire world is having a life and suffering through all this stuff that feels so big and important to them, and you completely lose that in the movie.”
She also raved, “That dialogue that it cuts is extremely important. Why should you even care about these people if you don’t even know who they are? The reason they fall in love is that they answer these questions, and it makes them really think about what’s going on with them, and it lets us see what’s happening in their lives and why they do the things they do.”
She also thought the ending was messed up in a lot of ways. She actually hated the ending of the book (initially), but thought the ending of the movie didn’t quite make sense. And she really didn’t like the changes to the Leguizamo character. After listening to her complaints (and listening to her read long passages of the book), I think that the father’s life and the reason for their deportation is probably left vague for the same reason that the lawyer becomes more virtuous and less at fault. It’s easier this way to say that the government’s inhumane policies are (clearly) at fault for the travesty of justice suffered by Natasha. The problem is, if you take all of the details out, you don’t have much of a story on Natasha’s side. You may convey a political message very successfully, but nobody will watch and engage with your movie, so you ultimately undermine your own efforts to reach people.
I also wish more of Charlie’s backstory from the book were included in the film.
And this is the only movie I’ve ever seen showcasing New York City that makes me not want to go there. (That’s pretty sad. All they do is walk around the city. They fall asleep in the grass. They ride everything that moves. They visit the extremely morose Statue of Liberty.) I’m not a hard sell when it comes to travelling. I can’t believe how drab this movie makes New York look. (It does, however, make me interested in visiting South Korea, maybe Jamaica, and possibly even other planets in our solar system.)
Overall:
The Sun is Also a Star is a really good book. Don’t watch the movie. As adaptations go, it’s much worse than the recent
A Wrinkle in Time (which should tell you something), though not quite as bad as that abysmal first Percy Jackson movie. (I’m pretty sure the writer of that screenplay never even read
The Lightning Thief.) If you’re concerned about immigration reform, get involved in politics. If you like Yara Shahidi or Charles Melton, watch
Grown-ish or
Riverdale instead. You’ll have more fun standing in line for popcorn as you wait to see
Avengers: Endgame than you will watching this entire film. (On the plus side, we did see a really cool trailer for this movie about a young Pakistani immigrant who loves Bruce Springsteen music. That looks good.)
