A Bit Infirm: A Review of Five Feet Apart

directed by Justin Baldoni
written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis

When The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance film about cancer patients, made a mint at the box-office some years ago, I suppose it was inevitable that someone else would dip into the well of life-threatening-illness-as-a-backdrop-for-romance before very long, and sure enough, five years later, we now have Five Feet Apart, a movie that swaps out Cystic Fibrosis for cancer, replaces one gangly towering matinee idol (Ansel Elgort) with another (Cole Sprouse), and finally replaces one up-and-coming ingenue (Shailene Woodley) with another (Haley Lu Richardson).

Five Feet Apart is the story of cystic fibrosis patients Stella Grant (Richardson) and Will Newman (Sprouse), who meet while receiving treatment at St. Grace's Hospital. Stella, who follows her treatment regimen religiously, has, by her own admission, control issues, and when she sees Will being somewhat lackadaisical about his own treatment it triggers her. After a lot of banter and semi-hostile exchanges, Stella convinces Will, who is suffering from a much rarer strain of CF that makes him ineligible for a lung transplant (unlike Stella) and requires experimental treatment, to take his regimen more seriously and to take his meds at the same time she takes hers. Inevitably, as they get to know one another, they fall for one another, but because CF patients cannot come within six feet of each other, a rule constantly enforced by the nurse in charge Barbara (Kimberly Gregory), they cannot so much as touch one another. Having lost much in her life, Stella, frustrated by these setbacks decides to rebel in her own little way: she declares that instead of staying six feet apart at all times they are near each other, Will and she will, instead, stay five feet apart, hence the movie's title.

It had been a while since I'd seen a young adult romance film prior to this; the last one I saw, coincidentally, also had a distance-themed title ("The Space Between Us") and fortunately, while this was was, like that film, similarly riddled with narrative tropes dating back to the 80s and probably even before then, it manages to be slightly more coherent as narrative.

As with most movies like this, the film stands or falls on the chemistry of its lead actors, and while their leaden dialogue is weighed down by the obvious prime directive of the plot (i.e. they have to fall in love) Richardson (vaguely resembling Keira Knightley in her youth) and Sprouse manage to strike up a fair bit of sparks in a few scenes. There is something off, though, about how glamorously healthy their faces look considering that their characters are both supposed to be quite ill.

Anyway, for all the cliches the filmmakers indulged in throughout this film, some of which made the movie quite predictable, it was gracious enough to eschew some of the more egregious tropes in movies about grave illness. I don't enthusiastically recommend the movie, but fans of this genre might find something to like here.



6/10