The Half of It

The Half of It is a modern, teenage, queer retelling of Cryano de Bergerac. Smart but awkward high school student Ellie Chu writes he classmates essays in exchange for money. This inspires football player Paul to hire Ellie to help him write lover letters to his crush Aster. Aster is intelligent and likes art and literature. Paul is sort of dumb and likes sausage and football. Ellie begins helping Paul first for the cash and then because she develops feelings for Aster. Along the way, Ellie and Paul become friends as well. Meanwhile, Aster is questioning whether she wants to marry her stable high school boyfriend. Paul’s letters act as a sign for her to try something new but when she meets Paul in person, he obviously does not have the same interests or intelligence he did in his writing.

Above everything, The Half of It is cliche. This is not necessarily a bad thing; cliches are a neutral concept that can be deployed to good or poor effect. In The Half of It, I would say cliches are used both well and poorly in fact. On the positive side, this movie does feel similar to many teen movies for straights. There are teen movie staples that they’ve now applied to a movie with a queer, nerdy main character. I’m all for that. Mostly, the cliches have charm to them, in my eyes anyways. Really, your mileage may vary as a viewer of this film as to which cliches you find charming and which were too far.

I did struggle with basically the main cliche and by extension, the romance between Ellie and Aster. This is a romance built on a foundation of dishonesty and deceit. Ellie convinces Paul to basically stalk Aster to find out what she likes. Then of course, Ellie lies to Aster by pretending to be Paul. I don’t love romances based on lying about oneself nor mistaken identity. This one is both. Still, that’s also the plot of literary classic Cyrano de Bergerac and basically the plot of the whole movie. There is no movie without this cliche so I’ll allow it but I do wish it had been more subverted or something. Following someone around so you can lie to them about who you are as a person is creepy! Don’t do it in real life or in fiction!

So much of the movie is done in montage that it is hard for the film to develop a great deal of originality. While it works well for pacing reasons, the characters don’t really get a chance to develop. All of them are giving a handful of basic personality traits that they stick to throughout the movie. Even lead characters Ellie and Paul don’t show much growth throughout the film. Part of what would have made this movie more enjoyable is if these characters did feel more unique and sketched out.

The best character in the film is actually Paul. I love this heterosexual disaster boy. I have been thinking that there should be more movies about WLW with straight male best friends. I’ve had a few of those and it is a relationship that would make good movie fodder. And Paul is such a great straight boy. He’s both very dumb and very sweet. Actor Daniel Diemer is also really good at the comedic moments which is another reason he’s the best part of the movie. In a scene where Ellie and Aster are swimming together and sharing a moment, I was more interested in the brief cutaways they did to Paul making sausages with Ellie’s dad.

It was smart to make the main relationship of the movie be Paul and Ellie. This movie isn’t a romance, really. It’s more of a coming of age film. But Ellie’s primary relationship in the film ends up being Paul. On the one hand, I did want more romance from this film. If it had been a straight movie, there would definitely be a romance angle and I do think it’s something of a double standard that this was downplayed here. On the other hand, Ellie and Aster ending up together would have also pissed me off because they’re young and their entire relationship was built on lies and mistaken identity. So sure, Ellie makes a nice new straight guy friend who will be in her life longer than any girl she might meet at this age. That’s sweet, especially because I actually liked said straight boy.

The Half of It has a really great core idea of taking Cyrano de Bergerac, updating it and making it queer. Honestly, I think its execution of this concept was good but not great. The story did lean heavily on cliches and the characters were a bit bland. However, I did enjoy its focus on friendship over romance and, much to my surprise, I really liked the teenage straight boy character. The Half of It won’t make my top ten list but it’s a perfectly charming teen WLW movie where nobody dies and there’s no gratuitous sex scenes. You could do a lot worse.

Overall rating: 7.6/10

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