Five Feet Apart is another entry in the surprisingly popular "sick girl finds love" genre. Of course, this began with The Fault in Our Stars. Everything, Everything maked the metaphor painfully obvious with a girl literally confined to her house as the world passes her by. Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is a variation of this that I loved. Even The Space Between Us is a gender-reversed SciFi take on it. Teens love stories about some force trying to hold them back from living their full life*. In the case of Five Feet Apart, the protagonist, Stella (Haley Lu Richardson) has Cystic Fibrosis to keep her separated from the world. As the film explains, CF - as those "in the know" call it - is a degenerative lung disease that keeps those with it in hospitals a lot and for extended periods of time. Even getting a lung transplant only buys a few years. And those with CF have to keep their distance from each other. If they get each other's bacteria, that could mean death. The rule is that they must keep six feet apart from anyone else with CF at all times. You can guess most of what this movie is based on that rule and the title.
*My favorite movie is Stranger Than Fiction which literalizes this, so I don't have much room to be snarky about this.
Stella is the pretty, smart, charming lead that you find in any romantic movie. Even when she's sweaty, scarred, coughing up mucus, and using an oxygen tank, she still looks like Haley Lu Richardson. She's very up-tight and organized, trying to make the best of her very bad situation. During one of her long stays in the hospital, Stella meets Will (Cole Sprouse): a CF rebel who sits on the ledges of roofs, doodles on his treatment schedule, and flirts a lot. Understandably, she falls for him. She teaches him to be anal-neurotic about sticking to his CF regiment. He teaches her how to loosen up and live life. He's very much the "manic pixie dream boy". Throughout the movie, I kept thinking back to Riley's imaginary boyfriend in Inside Out. Since Stella and Will can't ever touch or get close, the drama basically writes itself.
The movie has the very best of intentions. It works hard to educate the audience about CF. It shows the ugliness of the disease while also not letting the characters be solely defined by it. The movie tries to make CF more than just an impediment for the sake of plot even though that's exactly what it is. As often as it can, it tries to remember the seriousness of the condition and the risks the CF kids take by ignoring them. Still, it is a teen drama. It's not perfect about the handling of the disease, and that's what frustrated me the most. Specifically, the last half hour had me rolling my eyes and mumbling "stupid kids" like an old man the whole time. Despite some decent chemistry between Richardson and Sprouse, I never lost sight of how dumb it was for them to fall for each other and be so irresponsible. Especially Stella, who is defined by how sensible she is. The shift in her personality is too drastic for me to buy. Also, from my understanding, people with CF are safe to touch and be romantic with people who don't have CF. That isn't all that dangerous. I know I'm missing the point, and it doesn't take into account her isolation in the hospital, but why does she have to fall for the one other age-appropriate straight CF boy in the hospital? Isn't there some handsome cancer teen there too? I guess what I'm trying to say is the story is more than a little contrived.
I only saw this because Haley Lu Richardson has yet to disappoint me. I liked her in The Edge of Seventeen, Columbus, and Support the Girls. She's also very good in this and makes a lot of the movie work that otherwise wouldn't. She is playing a type though. So is Cole Sprouse. And Moises Arias (the gay best friend). And Kimberly Herbert Gregory (the stern but deeply caring black nurse). And the parents. I don't remember who plays the parents, which I think is fitting. All parents in a movie like this are pretty anonymous and aren't around enough to matter. Most of the actors are good at playing their roles, but you can easily recognize their description in a Screenwriting 101 book.
Five Feet Apart is a flawed movie with a big heart. It loves grand gestures and long pauses. It has a "love conquers all" ethos that some people will completely fall for. Sadly, if you don't fall for the romance of the movie*, there's not enough else about the movie to connect with. Haley Lu Richardson is great though. That's all I hoped for.
*Note: I don't mean "fall for" like it's a cheap trick. Some people are hopeless romantics. Some aren't. I don't judge either way.
One Final Thought: I'm going to need Hollywood to cool it with the casting of these movies. I feel like every actress I think is cute then gets casts as a sick dying girl (Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars, Olivia Cooke in Me & Earl & The Dying Girl, Haley Lu Richardson in Five Feet Apart). It's starting to make me feel like I have a type that doesn't speak well for me.
One [Other] Final Thought: Is the One "Fuck" Rule dead? My understanding is that the MPAA allows one utterance of "Fuck" in a movie before it's bumped up to an R rating. It's a dumb rule, but it makes a fun game out of tracking how a PG-13 movie uses its one "fuck". Well, Five Feet Apart is PG-13 and has two "fucks". One is a "fuck" and the other is a "fucking". Maybe that makes a difference. Or is the MPAA finally letting up on that? I'm not sure, but this ended up being the most exciting thing to me in the movie.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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