CHEMICAL HEARTS premieres on Amazon Prime August 21st
Review by Stephen Tronicek
The characters are far too mature in Chemical Hearts and that is both good and bad. It is the type of film that young people, including my twenty-one year old self, can step into to watch people our age philosophize and make better decisions than we ever could. On one hand, this is a little condescending. On the other hand, isn’t all wish-fulfillment. As far as these films go, Chemical Hearts manages itself better than most and calls to mind some strange intertextual connections and could prove interesting to both its target audience and the adults around them.
Chemical Hearts follows the budding romance of Henry (Austin Abrams, Paper Towns) and Grace (Lili Reinhart, Riverdale), two students who are part of their school’s journalism program.While their romance is initially easy, past traumas start to separate them.
The plot elements of Chemical Hearts feel a lot like elements from The Fault in Our Stars or other recent young adult films. As mentioned above, the primary draw of these films is the wish-fulfillment of these teenage characters making better choices than the audience would make. We want to believe that we’re smarter and more on the ball than we actually are. We want to believe that we can talk philosophy and interact in a way that isn’t messy, and these movies, if only for 100 minutes, allow us to experience that.
The crux appears when the movies start overdoing that, and for the first forty-five minutes of Chemical Hearts, that’s what happens. Henry, Grace, and their assorted friends all interact in a way that seems almost too deliberate for high school students. They make decisions with too much confidence.
These moments are thankfully saved by basically everything else in the film. Director Richard Tanne (Southside With You) and his production team craft a great looking film, with rich colorful frames. The performances are good across the board too, with Abrams and Reinhart holding a realistic chemistry. There’s a punch-drunk feeling that Abrams gives off that perfectly captures the stupidity with which young people go into a relationship.
Thankfully, an acknowledgement of that stupidity is in the film’s cards. The film gets far more engaging in the last half. Along with making a rather strange but rather compelling intertextual connection to Cronenberg’s Crash (you do the mental gymnastics to get there), Chemical Hearts actually manages to say something about what that punch-drunk mindset does to teenagers. The wrap up is a little too tidy, but at least the movie is trying to be honest with its audience.
That’s where Chemical Hearts’ greatest strength lies. While it is a little bit condescending, it makes the attempt to tell a story where the loose ends aren’t all tied up. Where it’s less good is the way it appeals to the melodramatic impulses of something like The Fault in Our Stars, talking down to its audience. Thankfully, the actors and the direction are good enough to make up for that.
