'All the Bright Places' Fails to Illuminate Its Potential Depths

As a casual way to pass the time during one’s infinite quarantine afternoons, “All the Bright Places” on Netflix seems, at face value, to be the perfect choice. A teenage romantic drama clothed in the genre-obligatory aesthetic packaging of muted colors and sunlight, "All the Bright Places" is populated with archetypical sensitive characters struggling with mental illness. Its motif of "wandering" (complete with the requisite drifting long shots of picturesque bike rides through nature) is envy inducing for today’s quarantine-caged audiences. Yet even with the low expectations set by a classic angst-filled romance narrative, “All the Bright Places” squanders potentially meaningful depth by failing to convincingly develop characters’ inner turmoil.

At a time when mental health is prominent in the cultural conversation, “All the Bright Places,” based on the novel of the same name by Jennifer Niven, depicts familiar topics of suicide, grief, and trauma. The story centers around high schoolers Violet Markey (Elle Fanning) and Theodore Finch (Justice Smith), who become partners for a class project at Finch’s encouragement. Their relationship develops slowly as, over the course of various "wanders" where the class must visit interesting places in their home state of Indiana, Finch coaxes Violet out of her shell of grief. She's been hiding there since her sister’s death in a car accident. As the weight of Violet’s sorrow begins to lift, however, Finch’s own struggles with mental illness rise to the surface, and the tables turn as Violet seeks to understand and alleviate his pain.

The two’s love story, which gains traction towards the middle of the movie, is unabashedly cheesy, featuring Finch quoting poetry, writing Violet a song on guitar, and actually throwing pebbles at her window — not to mention the obligatory sun-drenched montage of their honeymoon phase. Fanning and Smith bring poignant performances to their battered characters, but the film spends too much time on brooding stares or dramatic nighttime adventures and fails to devote enough attention towards developing the audience’s understanding of the characters. The stakes of this film are high — on paper. Yet the movie’s treatment of mental health fails to hook the audience, to allow viewers to become properly invested in their tragedies.

It’s not just the principal characters and their relationship that succumb to insufficient development. Violet’s friend Amanda (played by Virginia Gardner) appears several times but their friendship is never fleshed out, leaving viewers indifferent to Amanda’s role in the story. Family members receive similar treatment — take Finch’s sister, for example. We can tell that their bond is meaningful, but the movie does not take the time to develop their relationship beyond a cute handshake. Accordingly, their emotional rapport falls flat.

Haley does not execute his narrative progressions well at any turn, from the first kiss to the unexpectedly grim climax. Though we witness Finch’s sudden black moods, the journey to them is clumsy and heavy handed. Perhaps Haley wanted to show that we can’t get inside someone’s head, and that we don’t always know why people do the things they do. But even then, one never gets sucked into the story — audiences are always on the outside looking in, seeing scraps of Violet and Finch’s lives in a stilted sequence as disjointed as the colorful Post-It notes Finch populates his wall with.

—Staff writer Sara Komatsu can be reached at sara.komatsu@thecrimson.com