John Green creates worlds for his young adults that are dramatic and wide, with great swings, large emotions, big secrets, and big goals, for better or worse. And always, the threat of death: that of the protagonists themselves (The Fault in Our Stars, a tearjerker smash turned cancer romance), of pals (Looking for Alaska, a manic pixie dream girl mystery turned Hulu series), or of parents.
About John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down
The protagonist, high school student Aza Holmes, battles with derailment spirals from obsessive compulsive disorder in the author’s 2017 novel Turtles All the Way Down, which largely draws inspiration from her personal experience.
It might be challenging to convert a characterization of such an alienating interior experience to screen for both relatability and action.
When one partner is too terrified of germs to even kiss, what should happen to a romance?
It is quite the accomplishment that Hannah Marks’s charming John Green film adaption for Max allows us to enter Aza’s thoughts right away, punctuated by startling clicks and flashes of squirmy microscope slides.
Isabela Merced deserves special recognition for her believable portrayal of a split young girl from the Midwest. She plays a character who goes to Applebee’s, wants a partner, and dreams of attending Northwestern University to hear lectures by her favorite psychology professor, J Smith Cameron from Succession and the person who lives in continual terror of getting a deadly case of C diff bacteria.
The movie, which was adapted from a script by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, similarly treads carefully between a typical teenage comedy and a character study of mental illness. This delicate balance occasionally creates controversy but never quite finds equilibrium.
The caper side takes place in the quaint suburbs of Indianapolis, Ohio (filmed in Cincinnati, Ohio, a difference that will only be evident to anyone who know the Cincinnati skyline), and features a ridiculous, half-hearted, albeit relatably undramatic John Green narrative. The millionaire neighbor who works in white collar crime goes missing, and Aza and her lifelong best friend Daisy (Cree) learn that there’s a $100,000 prize for any information that leads to his whereabouts.
and that Aza bonded with his son, Davis (Felix Mallard), during a summer camp for bereaved kids. (She lost her father, he lost his mother; parents had to pass away!)
The original plot—which had Aza cuddling up to a visibly enamored Davis while the gleeful, unfazed Daisy snooped on them—is immediately dropped in favor of an excellent audio narration of Aza’s spiraling thoughts of microbiological dread. Broken down by intruding ideas, Aza naturally becomes fixated on self-theory and is prone to episodes of bizarre, dissociative thought:
Who is in charge if the majority of the bacteria in human bodies are foreign?
What is authentic? She inquires with Dr. Singh, her psychiatrist (Poorna Jagannathan), the renowned professor and her well-intentioned but overworked mother (Judy Reyes), who can’t decide on a course of action or accept that medicine is their only option. One of the film’s most heartbreaking and deftly handled revelations is the fear that anti-anxiety medications will transform the true “you.”
This nearly two-hour film may benefit from tightening up the rambling chats about the daunting possibility of life, as these digressions fluctuate from broadly representative of the vast existential crisis that is youth to vapid and back. However, Turtles All the Way Down, which derives its peculiar title from an allegory narrated by Smith’s professor, succeeds in bridging the enormous and the
minutiae of a high school student’s day with some skill. It believable has an indie rock soundtrack selected by a high school student on Spotify (Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy, LCD Soundsystem, and Tame Impala).
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Particularly, Aza’s well-worn and growingly tense bond with Daisy brings to mind recent YA hits like Max’s Unpregnant and Hulu’s Plan B. Also, Marks does a great job creating sexual tension without relying on direct communication or even physical contact; the majority of Aza and Davis’s relationship is developed through flirty texts, which are shown in an excessively large font size on screen.
The triumphs can be attributed, at least in part, to Merced’s nuanced and composed performance; her honest expression effortlessly conveyed humor, fear, hateful remarks about herself, panic attacks, and relief. Even with the help of an incredibly authentic Cree, her performance is capable of absorbing the film’s more off-kilter edges, hazy lines, and dramatic whiffs.
It is painful to witness as she skillfully manages, without devolving into histrionics, the self-destructive desires and horror of Aza’s disintegrating mental state. Like other books by Green, Turtles All the Way Down finds it difficult to strike a balance between being a heightened vehicle for emotions that feel larger than life and realistic teenage anguish. Things seem very much like human nature, at least in this adaptation.
• John Green Turtles All the Way Down will be accessible on Max in the US on May 2; a release date in the UK will be revealed later.