"It's a sin," he says, barely catching his breath. Paul's slow realization that Ellie likes Aster plays like horror across his face. He's perplexed, but he gets his explanation when Aster catches them, and Ellie starts to protest. His culinary inventions, like delicious-looking taco sausages, are embraced by Ellie and her dad.īut eventually Paul, being something of a dolt, misinterprets their relationship, thinking that any girl he's this at home around must be a romantic target. Ellie, the victim of the casual racism of her classmates, had shut herself off from the rest of Squahamish, but Paul becomes the one person she lets into her quiet life with her detached father, who still grieves the death of her mother. Instead, Ellie and Paul's friendship flourishes. But Wu's film bucks that trend, ultimately landing in a place more thematically similar to Edmond Rostand's bittersweet original ending.Īs the movie goes on, it becomes clear that Wu is not all that interested in who "gets" Aster. In those, the love interest ultimately finds out the person he or she had been really speaking to all that time, and they ride off into the proverbial sunset. You think you know how this story goes if you've seen any of the romantic comedy adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac, like Steve Martin's Roxanne, or even Netflix's Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, another high school-set version of that tale. Ellie woos the equally intellectually curious Aster with Wim Wenders quotes and musings on art Paul is the clueless face projecting those affections. But when her family's financial need becomes too great, she has no choice but to help him. He wants her to write a love letter to Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), the prettiest girl in school and daughter of the town pastor.Įllie, who is not out, secretly has a crush on Aster too, and turns Paul down. (Her teacher is well aware this is going on, but turns a blind eye.) One day, Ellie is followed home by the dopey sweet guy Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer) who wants to employ her for a different kind of writing assignment. Ellie helps her single father run the local train station, and, for cash on the side, she ghostwrites her fellow high schoolers' papers for a fee. In The Half of It, Leah Lewis plays Ellie Chu, the only person of Chinese descent in a tiny town called Squahamish. It's not an upsetting conclusion, but it doesn't spoon feed its audience a classic happy ending, opting for something more honest along the way. Each of the three main characters goes their separate ways. By the end of the film, no one has "gotten the girl" and there's no coupling up. But Alice Wu's The Half of It is truly not a love story, which makes it all the better. It's one of those things teens tend to say, but it's hard to believe, especially given that the movie is streaming on Netflix, which has become known in recent years as a teen rom-com factory where saccharine romance reigns. "This is not a love story," the heroine of The Half of It says at the outset of the movie. This post features spoilers for the ending of The Half of It.
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