Potentially Fatal Attraction: Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Spouse have lovely chemistry in surprisingly affecting "Five Feet Apart"


Five Feet Apart (2019)
115 min.
Release Date: March 15, 2019 (Wide)

There is no shortage of tragic, fleeting, forbidden YA romances, from 2014’s “The Fault in Our Stars” to 2017’s “Everything, Everything” and 2018’s “Midnight Sun.” The latest, “Five Feet Apart,” could have easily fallen into a sudsy disease-of-the-week machine that merely wants to produce tears. It comes as a nice surprise, then, that the film is more of a low-key, impassioned romantic drama with enough truth, sensitivity, and insight provided into genetic disorder cystic fibrosis. Life-affirming and emotionally sound with pangs of mortality, “Five Feet Apart” is rarely ever mawkish and not without a healthy dose of humor.

17-year-old Stella Grant (Haley Lu Richardson) suffers from cystic fibrosis and has checked into Saint Grace Hospital for an undetermined stay. There, the nurses enforce patients with CF to maintain a safe distance of six feet apart from each other. When Stella notices a new patient, Will (Cole Sprouse), a too-cool-for-school teen who’s there for a special clinical trial, they don’t immediately hit it off, but she begins holding him accountable to stick to his medical regiment. As the anal-retentive Stella can no longer deny her attraction to Will, she risks it all, stealing a foot back from their six-feet-apart proximity rule and asking Will out on a date with a five-foot-long pool cue between them. Stella and Will are both self-aware of their short time on this planet, and they want to spend it living.

Actor Justin Baldoni makes his feature directorial debut, working from a script by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, and assuredly tells his story that mostly takes place inside the hospital. (Speaking of that hospital, it’s the kind of place one even without CF would want to stay for a long weekend; there’s a swimming pool, a meditation room, and a wonderfully friendly staff who’s like a little family.) Stella’s live streams economically catch the viewer up to her status, although Baldoni may go a little heavy on the alternative pop songs (although M83’s “Wait” is well-chosen). 

With each new role, Haley Lu Richardson (2018’s “Support the Girls”) continues to build upon her emotional range as a performer. As Stella, she is instantly appealing and sympathetic, and she has a lovely, natural chemistry with Cole Sprouse (TV’s “Riverdale”), all grown up since 1999’s “Big Daddy,” even without showing any physical affection. Imbued with personalities by the actors, Stella and Will feel like real teenagers with interests and hobbies without being defined by their terminal sickness (she has taught herself how to design an app and he likes to draw), and while she likes to be in control and he is a bit of a rebel with a cynical side, they become each other’s first love. In a key supporting role, Moises Arias (2013’s “The Kings of Summer”) is likable and refreshingly non-stereotypical as Poe, a fellow CFer and Stella’s gay best friend.

Until the third act, “Five Feet Apart” keeps the melodrama at bay, so much that it’s a miracle films today can still trust audiences to invest their time in understated character interactions and allow those to be enough without any major plot machinations interfering. When the couple inevitably (and at this point in the story, understandably) leaves the hospital, the film does ramp up the dramatic stakes, pulling Stella and Will by the strings of an emotionally manipulative 11th-hour climax on a frozen pond, which might be a little obvious a metaphor for the couple being on thin ice. Nevertheless, the heart wants what the heart wants, and no matter how hard you fight, “Five Feet Apart” chips away at your cynicism as a surprisingly affecting teenybopper romance.

Grade: B

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