The Half Of It
“In these times of upheaval, The Half Of It makes the perfect getaway car.”
Title: The Half of It (2020)
Director: Alice Wu 👩🏻🇺🇸🌈
Writer: Alice Wu 👩🏻🇺🇸🌈
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 5/5
I’m riding high on Asian American movies and damn, it feels good. In this year alone, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance Film Festival and Cathy Yan walloped the big screen with candy-colored explosives in Birds of Prey. Then, as the tightening grip of coronavirus closed its fist over Brooklyn, I found escapism through Alan Yang’s Tigertail and Lynn Chen’s I Will Make You Mine, the latter of which finds digital release on May 26. Meanwhile, Lucky Grandma was one of my favorites at Tribeca Film Festival last year, and they’ve just announced their own streaming debut of May 22. (Mark your calendars!)
Even among the above works that each contribute something unique to East Asian American cinema, Netflix’s The Half Of It carved out a special place in my heart and set up shop. Not unlike filmmaker Alice Wu’s previous cult hit, Saving Face (2004), The Half Of It blends drama, low-key comedy, and romance against a coming-of-age backdrop.
The film wades into the tangled mess of human nature and artfully renders its characters with dimension, as Wu picks apart the threads that exist between people and patiently follows them see where each leads. For Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), the protagonist tracks a new friendship with classmate Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer); a crush on the incandescent Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire); and a quiet, aching relationship with her father, Edwin Chu (Collin Chou), who has yet to recover from the premature death of Ellie’s mother. Meanwhile, Paul, Aster, and Edwin each battle their own personal demons.
Somehow, all this turmoil manages to cohere into something light. Aided by a pitch-perfect soundtrack featuring bedroom pop and rustic Americana, The Half Of It uplifts the stew of teenage angst into rose-tinted memories: driving down the freeway, hair in your face, the soulful sprint of Sharon van Etten’s “Seventeen” crooning for halcyon days in a way that hits particularly hard under a harsh reality of prolonged quarantine and economic upheaval. In these times, The Half Of It makes the perfect getaway car.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Between a filmmaker, main character, and love interest who are all women, The Half Of It uses a female perspective to tell its story. At its emotional core, too, Ellie works to overcome the negative space left behind by her mother, like a years-long inhalation she struggles to let out.
Neither do men get short shrift. They play equal partners in this layered film, occupying key roles through Paul, who serves as a catalyst for change in Ellie’s life, and through her heartbroken father who grounds Ellie in her sense of self. Impressively, no characters feel flattened along gender fault lines.
Race: 5/5
Equally simple to calculate is The Half Of It’s centering of characters of color. At its most obvious, Wu’s parents immigrated from Taiwan and her experience as an Asian American filmmaker translates directly to the screen, where Ellie’s Chinese parents have immigrated to the fictional town of Squahamish, USA. Her Chinese heritage manifests in casual signifiers like the drinking of Yakult (which is Japanese, but prevalent all over Asia and Latin America), shared dialogue with her father in Mandarin, or seeing him make braised pork sausage with Paul.
The actors who play Chinese roles all fall under Taiwanese or Chinese ancestry, too: Leah Lewis was born in Shanghai while Collin Chou, who plays her onscreen dad, is Taiwanese. We even get an Easter egg when glimpsing the illustrious Shanghai-born Joan Chen (Twin Peaks, Lust Caution) as Ellie’s mother, seen only in a Polaroid photo affixed to the inside of her daughter’s guitar case.
In addition, the film’s main trio includes Aster, a white-passing Latina whose family speaks Spanish in the home. However, her past lacks the cultural specificity of Ellie’s story; all we know is that the Flores family hails from Sacramento, CA, but their ethnic origins are never confirmed. Still, it’s positive that Lemire, who plays Aster, is herself multiracial with Latin heritage, and that Miami-born Enrique Murciano of Cuban descent plays Aster’s dad. Other hints include Aster’s username, DiegaRivera, which references the famous Mexican painter.
Ultimately, this handwaved “Latin-ness” collapses under its own ambiguity. But within the context of The Half Of It, I enjoyed seeing the primary romance deviate from the white and Anglo-Saxon norm.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
Romantic and platonic love circulates between the three high school seniors of Ellie, Paul, and Aster, showcasing the fluid sexuality that seems to come naturally to Gen Z dramas. While some viewers might try to pin down Ellie and Aster as lesbian or bisexual, The Half Of It goes the route of other contemporaries like Selah and the Spades (2020) or HBO’s Euphoria, which generally eschew labels in favor of giving their teenagers the space to sort through gender and sexuality for themselves.
Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.33/5
The Half Of It harnesses the desperate softness of friendship and familial love to build its narrative backbone. Whether it’s seeing a father and daughter quietly sort through grief alone (and then together); the cautious hope of a new ally to fend for you at school; or yes, the trepidation that comes with lusting after someone you feel is unattainable, The Half Of It uncurls over its runtime like a tender fern seeking light. I came away from the patient film with my heart utterly full.
Like The Half Of It? Try these other titles featuring young queer women.
Selah and the Spades (2020)
Dickinson
Booksmart (2019)