movie review the half of it

The Half of It

The pieces may seem familiar in “The Half of It,” but the way Alice Wu assembles them results in a fresh and inspired whole.

The writer/director’s queer take on “ Cyrano de Bergerac ” features several of the kinds of characters we so often see in Young Adult films and novels: hyper-verbal teenagers given to expressing their anxieties and longings through witty, self-aware narration. It takes place in the sort of small town that may seem quaint to the outside viewer but feels like a prison to the restless kids trapped within it. And the fundamental premise—that teens on disparate rungs of the high-school social hierarchy can forge secret yet life-changing bonds—is perennial.

But by telling a personal tale inspired by elements of her own young life, Wu achieves both singularity and universality. And it helps a great deal that the actress functioning as her stand-in has such a smart and compelling screen presence. Leah Lewis stars as Ellie Chu, a studious and shy Chinese-American immigrant who’s the only Asian kid in fictional Squahamish, Washington. Ellie may seem innocent but she’s savvy enough to have developed a booming business writing essays for cash; this also allows her to help support the cramped apartment she shares with her widower dad ( Collin Chou ), an engineer who spends quiet evenings watching classic movies like “ Casablanca ” to improve his English.

Into this vivid setting, Wu introduces two characters who will force Ellie to emerge from her lonely shell. Paul Munsky ( Daniel Diemer ) is the sweetly oafish tight end on the high school’s terrible football team. He asks Ellie to help him write a love letter to Aster Flores ( Alexxis Lemire , no relation to … well, me), a beautiful newcomer who’s reluctantly found herself ensconced in the popular clique. While Paul is drawn to Aster for her looks, Ellie’s attraction runs deeper as she recognizes something more substantive within her. What was supposed to have been just one letter eventually leads to a back-and-forth on text message, with Ellie-in-disguise exchanging book and film references and philosophical musings that Paul could never muster. There’s an infectious energy to this clever correspondence, which ironically allows Ellie to express who she really is, maybe for the first time. Similarly, Aster gets comfortable enough to share that she feels like a bit of a misfit herself. Lemire has such a lovely presence, she makes you wish that her character were fleshed out a bit more; Aster ends up feeling like an idealized figure for both Ellie and Paul to swoon over in their own ways, but perhaps that’s the point.

The more meaty and moving relationship actually occurs between Ellie and Paul themselves. He initially comes off as a doofus but he’s genuine, loyal and has a heart of gold, and he unexpectedly becomes the first real friend Ellie’s ever had. Diemer brings a puppy-doggish authenticity and likability to the role that are quite charming. Conversely, Ellie inspires Paul to dig within himself and learn how to make more meaningful connections than he’s grown accustomed to with his idiot football buddies—their practice conversations over table tennis serve as a sweet training montage—and in the process, she learns to open up and trust people.

“The Half of It” drags a bit in the middle, just as the tension should be mounting as to whether the characters’ true identities and motives will be exposed. There’s a languid quality to some of the pacing that perhaps fits with the sleepy, Pacific Northwest setting but weakens the film from an overall narrative perspective. There’s also an underdeveloped subplot involving Aster and the pretty boy she’s kinda-sorta dating ( Wolfgang Novogratz , who also appeared in Netflix’s other high-school Cyrano story, 2018’s “ Sierra Burgess Is a Loser ”).

But through it all, Wu achieves a welcome generosity toward her characters with her thoughtful handling of race, language, sexual orientation and religion (Ellie’s an atheist; Aster’s the preacher’s daughter). These are teenagers striving to be respectful of their families’ traditions and expectations while also forging paths that satisfy their own dreams and drives. 16 years after her writing/directing debut, the lesbian romance “ Saving Face ,” Wu follows it up with a film that’s once again open-minded and big-hearted.

Premieres on Netflix today, 5/1.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Leah Lewis as Ellie Chu
• Daniel Diemer as Paul Munsky
• Alexxis Lemire as Aster Flores
• Collin Chou as Edwin Chu
• Wolfgang Novogratz as Trig Carson
• Catherine Curtin as Colleen Munsky
• Anton Sanko

Cinematographer

• Greta Zozula

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‘The Half of It’ on Netflix: Film Review

There’s a lovely friendship at the center of Alice Wu's sweet, sincere high school Cyrano story, revealing what we've been missing from teen movies.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Ellie Chu is a small-town Cyrano, with a twist, in Netflix original “ The Half of It ,” which could well be the most literary high school movie to come along in the short lives of its adolescent audience — and not just because writer-director Alice Wu was loosely inspired by a late-19th-century French play that most teens won’t have read (although they might have seen “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser,” which also drew from Edmond Rostand). “The Half of It” qualifies as literary because it loves language; it relishes reading, respects writing and believes in the power of words to make skeptics fall in love.

Right, no need to get all purple about it. What’s this about a twist, you ask?

Well, “The Half of It” hews pretty close to a handful of teen movie genres. It belongs to the “Clueless” tradition, of course, transposing a classic romance to the hormonal petri dish of adolescence. There’s the John Hughes-ian dimension, offering yet another comic take on the social hierarchy of high school and how various characters fit into (and challenge) the pecking order. There’s the familiar “greener pastures” angle, in which the goal is for a picked-on caterpillar to escape her conservative cocoon and become the big-city butterfly she was meant to be. And then there’s the representation aspect, which shakes up those other formulas in interesting ways.

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In “Cyrano de Bergerac,” two dudes share a love for the same woman, but Cyrano knows his nose is a deal breaker, and so he agrees to assist his rival in seducing Roxane. Here, the Roxane character is a new-to-school Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), inwardly artistic but outwardly the stuff of which muses are made. That’s conventional enough, although Wu rethinks the Cyrano role, making it closeted Chinese American 17-year-old Ellie Chu ( Leah Lewis ), who agrees to ghost-write love letters on behalf of her thickheaded classmate Paul Munsky ( Daniel Diemer ), both of whom are sweet on Aster.

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There’s an outdated, unflattering nickname — it rhymes with “grab bag” — for the kind of hetero amiga who gravitates to gay men, but movies almost never depict the inverse: a straight guy who hits it off with a young lesbian. That means “The Half of It” isn’t nearly so constrained by cliché, with the advantage that Wu is free to explore this dynamic — one that, according to a director’s statement Netflix issued alongside the press notes, the “Saving Face” helmer has experienced in her own life, but struggled to translate into a film (16 years passed between the two features).

In the end, the Cyrano storyline isn’t nearly so engaging — or sincere — as the dynamic between Ellie and Paul. She’s a band geek who writes her classmates’ English papers for a fee; he’s a football jock who can barely form a coherent sentence. There’s no reason these two would become besties, except he needs someone to punch up the love note he’s written to Aster, and she needs the $50 he’s willing to pay. It’s hard to believe anyone could be quite so dense as Paul — or as poetic as Ellie — in high school, and yet, whatever clicks between them feels real, and so lovingly rendered that it upstages the movie’s romantic A-plot, which continues as the inarticulate but endearing sod leans on Ellie to keep up the charade with many more letters.

The seeming mismatch between Paul and Ellie can be found in a million high school friendships, wherein tight-knit bonds form over something more meaningful or personal than sharing the same race, class or sexual orientation. Maybe they like the same music, or the same movies. These two happen to like the same girl — who’s dating a vaguely defined slab of self-confidence named Trig (played by “Sierra Burgess” alum Wolfgang Novogratz), presumably the school quarterback, although the team hasn’t scored a touchdown in 10 years, so his popularity must come from something else, like his mad dimple-flexing ability. But Aster is deeper than that, and ambiguous enough in her affections that Ellie isn’t discouraged.

“The Half of It” is so bizarrely sexless that it doesn’t matter that Trig plans to propose to Aster. The couple is evidently saving it for marriage. Hormones have everything to do with Paul’s attraction to her as well, although they only ever get as far as first base. And though there’s a scene late in the film in which Ellie and Aster sneak off to a secluded hot spring together, the TV-14-rated movie is coy about just how skinnily they’re actually dipping. Oddly, they add layers as the intimacy between them escalates.

But that seems apt for a movie that aims to be as open-minded about Ellie’s orientation as it is nonjudgmental toward its religious characters. The film’s climactic coming-out scene takes place in church, and though it’s tough to imagine the congregation silently allowing a handful of teenagers to commandeer the service, the setting speaks volumes about the role faith plays in the characters’ actions. Besides, given all the levels of deception that have led to this moment, there’s really no elegant way for Paul and Ellie to come clean about their scheme.

Wu also invests time in Ellie’s home life, where her widowed father (Collin Chou) practices his English by watching classic movies. As those scenes demonstrate, there’s a huge portion of the American adolescent experience that’s been excluded from high school movies. One could see this as an identity politics issue, but from a film critic’s point of view, it comes down to this: Personal stories are stronger stories, representation does matter, and specifics are what make a movie memorable — as in original details like the invention of “taco sausage” or Ellie’s delight at discovering Yakult in the coach’s vending machine.

It’s also made fresh by the myriad literary and cinematic references Wu weaves into Aster’s correspondence with “Paul.” With its slightly nerdy, play-on-wordy title, “The Half of It” alludes to the ancient Greek belief that two-faced humans were separated by the gods, devoting their lives to finding their lost soulmates (if you like the idea, read Plato’s “Symposium,” or check out “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”). Wu’s unique take on teen angst hints at what else we’ve been missing by allowing studios to limit who can tell such stories. If the genre seems played out, or else rife with clichés, it’s a direct result of such exclusion. Expanding the field, as Netflix does, reveals that we still haven’t seen the half of it.

Reviewed online, April 28, 2020. (In Tribeca Film Festival.) Rating: TV-14. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Likely Story production. Producers: Anthony Bregman, M. Blair Breard, Alice Wu. Executive producers: Erica Matlin, Gregory Zuk. Co-producer: David Bausch.
• Crew: Director, writer: Alice Wu. Camera: Greta Zozula. Editors: Ian Blume, Lee Percy. Music: Anton Sanko.
• With: Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire, Wolfgang Novogratz, Collin Chou, Becky Ann Baker. (English, Mandarin dialogue)

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The Half of It

When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush. When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush. When smart but cash-strapped teen Ellie Chu agrees to write a love letter for a jock, she doesn't expect to become his friend - or fall for his crush.

• Daniel Diemer
• Alexxis Lemire
• 341 User reviews
• 86 Critic reviews
• 74 Metascore
• 6 wins & 10 nominations

Top cast 40

• Paul Munsky

• Aster Flores

• Trig Carson

• Mrs. Geselschap

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• (as Macintyre Dixon)

• Colleen Munsky

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• Senior Girl (In Hallway)

• Hangout Dude

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• (as Gabrielle Samels)

• Quaddie Girl #2 (Solange)

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• Trivia The opening monologue is the story told by Aristophanes in Plato 's Symposium. Aristophanes was a comedic playwright at the time of Socrates and Plato and is considered the greatest Greek comedic writer. The Symposium is a dialogue about a dinner that Socrates attends. During dinner Socrates, in typical fashion, begins to ask questions of his host and the other guests. The dialogue centers on the topic of love, each interlocutor attempts to answer the question what is love? Aristophanes' story tells of how humans use to be whole and the gods got jealous and split us apart. We spend our lives searching for that other half. According to Aristophanes, our other half could be someone of the same or opposite gender.
• Goofs As Mrs. Geselschap first talks to Ellie, the distance between Geselschap's drinking mug and her face keeps changing between cameras.

Ellie Chu : Gravity is matter's response to loneliness.

• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Movies of 2020 (So Far) (2020)
• Soundtracks Annie's Song Performed by Amy Carrigan Written by John Denver

User reviews 341

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• Apr 30, 2020
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• May 1, 2020 (United States)
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‘The Half of It’ Review: Being Yourself (and That Person, Too)

In this comedy from Alice Wu, love letters reveal everything about a person, except their identity.

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By Kyle Turner

Every generation gets its own “Cyrano de Bergerac,” from the Steve Martin comedy “Roxanne” to Netflix’s “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser.” But Alice Wu’s new high school-set film, “The Half of It” (also on Netflix) , transcends the limitations that frequently serve as obstacles to ingenuity in young adult movies. By exploring issues of race and queerness with emotional complexity, it treats teenagers with the sophistication they deserve.

Wu’s Cyrano is the bookish Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), navigating the casual racism of her small town while also managing the expectations of the peers who pay her to write their essays. Her way with words makes her the ideal choice to ghostwrite letters for the cute-but-daft football player Paul (Daniel Diemer) to the object of his affection, Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Having yearned for Aster from afar, Ellie jumps at the chance to perform literary drag.

Wu’s feature debut, “Saving Face” (2005) , was one of the rare films to focus on the queer Asian-American experience. Now, “The Half of It” reflects sharpened ideas and a honed directorial voice. While the question of “fitting in” has clichéd implications in many teen movies, Wu digs deeper, considering the lonely cost of assimilation for a girl whose outsider status is layered.

The husky-voiced Lewis embodies, with palpable anguish, the stinging contradictions of emotional freedom and romantic fraudulence that abound when writing these notes. In letters (or over text), you can be anybody and yourself at once, and Wu suffuses the film with a painfully mature understanding of the ache of longing for the impossible. With tenderness, humor and beauty, “The Half of It” comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.

The Half of It

Rated PG-13 for brief language, teen drinking and the delicate throb of unrequited love. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix .

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Netflix’s queer romance The Half of It is a smart, funny joy

Alice Wu’s new film takes pleasure in the details

by Karen Han

The original movies on Netflix have generally skewed in three vastly different directions. There are the obvious prestige plays — Bong Joon-ho’s Okja , Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman , the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs , and so forth. Then there are the originals that feel like Lifetime or Hallmark movies, like The Knight Before Christmas or Secret Obsession . And then there are the genre plays, like I Am Mother and Bright . So it comes as a pleasant surprise that the latest movie to hit the platform, Alice Wu’s The Half of It , isn’t so easily categorized. The idea of a teenage version of Cyrano de Bergerac seems to lend itself to pure romantic fluff, but Wu imbues it with incredible depth and consideration. This isn’t a film that’s solely concerned with crushes — Wu folds in the highs and lows of living in a small, conservative town, the challenges of immigrating to a new country, and the thorny process of just growing up.

Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) runs a small business writing her high-school classmates’ essays for them, and endures racist taunts (“Chugga-chugga-Chu-chu!”) on her bike ride to and from school. Her father (Collin Chou), who immigrated from China for the promise of more opportunities abroad, works as a train-station master. He has a PhD in engineering, but it’s meaningless in a town that doesn’t see him as more than his accent. Though Ellie’s teacher, Mrs. Geselschap (Becky Ann Baker), knows who’s behind all the essays she’s reading, she encourages Ellie to apply to colleges beyond their (fictional) town of Squahamish, Washington. But Ellie can’t imagine leaving her father behind. Her status quo starts to change when she receives a different kind of commission: Paul (Daniel Diemer), one of the school jocks, wants her help writing love letters to Aster (Alexxis Lemire). The catch: Ellie is harboring a crush on Aster, too.

It feels sacrilegious to say that a teen romance succeeds by dialing down the usual teen-drama horniness, but what makes The Half of It more than just a retread of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play (or the updated movie re-imaginings, like Roxanne or The Truth About Cats & Dogs ) is its investment in its characters, rather than its kissing. If the audience has no investment in Paul or Aster’s experiences, the story becomes one-dimensional. But because Wu, who also penned the script, takes the time to flesh out all three players in the triangle, the romance story becomes more complicated than the question of whether Ellie and Aster will finally get together.

What’s more impressive is that the details that make these characters feel so real are just that: details, rather than extraordinary. Aster’s beauty makes her well-liked at school, but she’s also expected to fit the cheerleader mold like the school’s other popular girls. Ellie is often referred to as “the Chinese girl” wherever she goes, and is so used to it that she doesn’t resist. The Half of It doesn’t have to be a “big theme” movie to comment on casual racism, or stifling individuality, particularly that of young women, in favor of outdated and patriarchal norms.

But Wu also pays attention to the smaller aspects of each character, down to how they text. Paul uses emojis with abandon, but Ellie and Aster are both careful about their capitalization and punctuation. As audiences get to know these characters’ quirks, the characters also get to know each other, making the inevitable reveal of the truth messy and protracted instead of cleanly cut.

Lewis, Deimer, and Lemire also make a wonderful trio. Unlike, say, the teens in Glee , they still look young enough that their gawkiness around each other feels genuine, not contrived. Paul may be a meathead — literally and metaphorically, as his family is in the sausage business — but he’s a sweetheart, too, and his burgeoning friendship with Ellie and her father is one of the movie’s highlights. He’s as eager-to-please as a puppy, even doing his best to mirror Ellie’s father’s cooking techniques.

And Lewis makes it clear that Ellie’s outsider status in town has less to do with her personality than the way the rest of her overwhelmingly white town sees her. Her first big high-school party, which she attends thanks to an invite from Paul, sees other students immediately talking to her and inviting her to play games, even though she’s not doing anything noticeably different. Ellie’s demeanor doesn’t really change as her friendship with Paul introduces her to more social circles. Instead, the people around her are overcoming their notions about her.

As Ellie states in the film’s opening moments, this isn’t a story where everyone gets what they want. The Half of It features romance, but it’s more of a teen drama than a rom-com, focusing on a coming-of-age immigrant story where romance is one facet of the experience. With The Half of It , Wu has crafted a love story that tackles love in all senses, not just romantic, prioritizing not just who gets to kiss who, but what each character hopes and dreams for. They’re so well-realized that watching The Half of It feels like the beginning of a new relationship. It’s exciting, enticing, and filled with hope for what comes next — in this case, seeing what else Wu has up her directorial sleeve.

The Half of It is streaming on Netflix now.

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‘The Half of It’ Review: Alice Wu’s Queer YA Charmer Is a Joyous Ode to Friendship

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Like many teen movies, “ The Half of It ” begins with an animated illustration of the origins of love from Plato’s Symposium, much like that other queer cinema classic, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” What’s that? The last YA movie you watched on Netflix didn’t devote entire scenes to explaining the major tenets of existentialism through discussions on “No Exit”? From waxing poetic on Wim Wenders to cleverly chosen “Casablanca” references, “The Half of It” is a smart riff on “Cyrano de Bergerac” that celebrates friendship and self-acceptance over romance. It’s no wonder the film so effortlessly folds highbrow aims into an accessible coming of age story — writer/director Alice Wu knows her stuff.

Best known for her 2004 indie hit “Saving Face,” Wu makes her long-awaited return to feature filmmaking with this breezy and heartfelt teen comedy. Though both of Wu’s films follow young Chinese-American women coming into their queerness, “The Half of It” is clearly aimed at a younger — and broader — audience. While it’s tempting to imagine a more egalitarian Hollywood where Wu was allowed to develop a project with the sex appeal and multiple Asian women characters that made “Saving Face” so revolutionary, it’s thrilling to see her come out swinging with a surefire hit.

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With its plucky teen protagonist and engaging storytelling, “The Half of It” is sure to hit big with Netflix viewers who made 2018’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” one of the platform’s most popular original films (and spawned a franchise in the process).

After the illustrated explanation of the origins of love, we meet Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a precocious high schooler who keeps to herself while running a lucrative side hustle ghostwriting papers for her classmates. Her favorite teacher, played by Becky Ann Baker (the “Freaks and Geeks” star is always a welcome presence in any teen fare), nudges Ellie to apply to a liberal arts college out of state rather than the state school she’s considering, for financial reasons and to stay closer to home.

A dutiful daughter, Ellie lives in a modest flat above the town train station with her widower father (Collin Chou), whose PhD in engineering from China is all but useless in the U.S. Wu includes the nuances of the immigrant experience with a delicate touch, showing Ellie weathering racist schoolyard taunts and stressful calls to the gas company that doesn’t understand her father’s accented English.

On her daily solo bike home from school, Ellie is clumsily accosted by Paul (Daniel Diemer), who asks for her help writing a love letter to popular girl Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire). Ellie is reluctant at first, but remembers the gas bill and accepts. Thus begins an almost unbelievably erudite epistolary romance between Ellie and Aster, who clearly caught Ellie’s eye long before Paul entered the picture. Their letters brim with personal reflections and literary references, much like the film’s periodic chapter breaks, which are delineated by musings on the nature of love by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Jean Paul Sartre.

When dopey Paul can’t keep up, Ellie decides to school him in the art of conversation, and the two grow closer over games of ping pong and movie dinners with her dad. Paul may be slow, but he eventually picks up on Ellie’s true feelings for Aster. Though his initial reaction is not great, Paul soon becomes a model of loving allyship, encouraging and accepting Ellie’s queerness before she’s able to say it out loud.

Dramatically, “The Half of It” would have benefited from a more focused structure. The Ellie/Aster and Ellie/Paul stories feel silo-ed off from one another, like two distinct narratives running parallel rather than building to a cohesive crescendo. The literary chapter breaks, while cute, could’ve helped in this regard but end up feeling arbitrary. This split perspective may be due to the nature of any “Cyrano” riff, but one would hope having a pre-determined structure would help more than hurt.

“The Half of It” has lofty aims for its version of the classic tale — which it mostly achieves, albeit without much fanfare. In centering Paul and Ellie’s friendship, Wu nobly set out to make a rom-com where no one gets the girl and it all turns out alright. But after Ellie and Aster share a hot springs dip that is dripping with adorably innocent tension, it’s hard not to wish Wu had given us the queer fairy tale ending of our dreams. “The Half of It” is ultimately Ellie’s story, and she’s such a refreshing and lovable character that you can’t blame everyone for wanting a piece of her, even if it’s only half.

“The Half of It” will be available to stream on Netflix starting on Friday, May 1.

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B ecause humans spend so much energy in pursuit of romance, we sometimes forget that platonic relationships can be even more complicated—and generally last longer too. That’s just one of the ideas thrumming beneath the surface of writer-director Alice Wu’s The Half of It, streaming on Netflix, a prickly-tender film about teenage friendship, first love and all the blurry gradations in between. It’s sweet and funny, but also, in places, as raw as a scraped knee.

Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) is a straight-A student living in a dull town in the Pacific Northwest. She has a great, dry wit, but she doesn’t really have any friends, maybe because she’s managing so much anxiety at home: her father (Collin Chou) earned an advanced engineering degree in China, but in the States, where he moved his family when Ellie was small, his imperfect English has held him back. He’s also, it seems, still numb with grief—his wife, Ellie’s mother, is dead, and he spends his days watching movies like Casablanca and His Girl Friday as a way of improving his English, though it’s clear they simply give him solace.

Ellie holds together this little family of two, writing papers for her fellow students at $20 a pop. “It’s an A or you don’t pay” is her motto. She’s so good at this academic sleight of hand that a classmate she barely knows, Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer), a charming but awkward jock who works part time in his family’s sausage business, approaches her to write a love letter for him, Cyrano de Bergerac –style. The object of his affection is the prettiest and nicest girl in school, Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), a deacon’s daughter who’s sensitive and bookish, with a flair for art.

The complication is that Ellie herself has a crush on Aster. She at first refuses to help Paul, but relents when she needs $50 to pay the electricity bill her father has neglected. The letters she writes under Paul’s name—augmented by a series of ghostwritten text messages—are so effective that they almost get him what he wants, though they also expose his own underlying insecurities.

What’s wonderful about The Half of It is the way it respects everyone’s insecurities, without letting its characters get away with their biases. Ellie feels like an outsider, perhaps not so much because she’s a person of color in a mostly white town but because she’s so much smarter than everyone else—and also happens to be gay. She and Aster, through those letters and texts ostensibly written by Paul, connect over art and books. But Aster, so lovely that you can’t imagine she’d have a care in the world, reveals that because of how the world perceives her, she feels lumped into a group where she doesn’t belong: “I’m like a lot of people—which makes me kind of no one.”

That line, perceptive and alive, is typical of The Half of It. This is Wu’s second film: her first, worth seeking out, is the 2004 Saving Face, about a young Chinese-American woman (Michelle Krusiec) trying to navigate her closeted love life, even as her extremely homophobic mother (Joan Chen) reveals, at age 48, that she’s pregnant, with the father nowhere in sight. The plot mechanics of The Half of It creak a little; once in a while, a scene raises more questions than it answers. But the movie is so vital that that doesn’t matter much, and its young actors hit every delicate beat perfectly. When you’re young and you long to be in love, friendship somehow seems like less, even when it may be more. Yet there’s no denying that love triangles hurt like hell. Why do you think their points are shaped like arrows?

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The Half of It Reviews

The Half of It brilliantly capitalizes on the everlasting appeal of an easy-to-swallow romcom by disrupting the very same tropes it inevitably clings to, resulting in a film that feels comfortably familiar but still entirely fresh.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2022

That rare film in which words marry technology. It puts the text back in texting.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2022

Funny and charming and lovely and real.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2021

Narratively this doesn't reinvent the wheel with this umpteenth retelling of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, but this is also absolutely one of the strongest teen movies released in recent years.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2021

The update gains substance when attraction comes from the duo's shared fascination with arts, culture, and expression. These new dynamics work cleverly, making for bright and insightful entertainment.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2021

The Half of It clips along beautifully, giving you all the sweet charm of your favorite rom-coms while also giving you some thoughtful meditation on what love is.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2021

The Half Of It is a likeable if not especially memorable entry into the teen romantic-comedy genre - but it gains most of its merit through its sensitive depiction of outsiderdom and self-acceptance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 20, 2021

The idea of a teenage version of Cyrano de Bergerac seems to lend itself to pure romantic fluff, but Wu imbues it with incredible depth and consideration.

Full Review | Feb 20, 2021

Netflix has slowly built up a nice library of coming of age rom-coms. The Half of It is mostly in the middle-tier of those, but Ellie is the kind of protagonist we don't see often enough.

It's a wistful charmer.

The Half of It has a lot going on, but it manages to keep all of it flowing in a coherent and fun manner. With a fantastic concept, it features more than a few surprises along the way, easily elevating it way above your typical high school movie.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

[It's] a fairly down-to-earth portrayal of high school, from the fashion to the clever inclusion of social media which defines the modern-day teenage experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 1, 2021

The Half of It might feel tame in comparison, but it is just as genuine.

Full Review | Dec 30, 2020

This story has been done many times, yet it feels fresh and new in Wu's version, which is about a whole lot of things besides unrequited love.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 18, 2020

Whether you were the jock, the nerd, or the popular kid, there's something in this movie that just might make you feel pretty darn seen.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2020

An honest story which contains a lot of topics beyond romance. It speaks of self-love, of growing up, accepting oneself, friendship and more. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 3, 2020

The Half of It is a much-needed, witty boost to the genre of romantic comedies, which have been struggling for years with mediocre and uninspired stories.

Full Review | Jul 18, 2020

An intelligent and intimate movie that captures the feelings of longing for the first love. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 10, 2020

The Half of It, new today, seems like something of a remedy to that - an undeniably but not tokenistically progressive affair from writer-director Alice Wu about a queer love triangle in the small, simple town of Squahamish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 26, 2020

A warm hearted, funny and really well-crafted movie about two girls, one boy, love letters and the art of romantic texting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2020