Film Review: Five Feet Apart Wants You To Cry
Five Feet Apart was made with the goal to have viewers balling at the forbidden love of Will (Cole Sprouse) and Stella (Haley Lu Richardson). Both suffering from cystic fibrosis, they cannot touch each other, which strangely gives them an opportunity to know the other on a deeper, spiritual level. When you take the physicality of love out of the equation, you are left with the emotionality of it, and Five Feet Apart is FULL of sentiment.
Get ready teenage girls, across the land, to pick up your Kleenex for the next great, hospital love story. If you are a sap for tear-jerkers, you will adore Five Feet Apart. It enriches the formula of romances based on the terminally ill or sick by educating people on the disease its protagonists suffer. At times, romances involving “the sick” denote illness into an occasional cough and sporadic dizziness. Yet, Fault In Our Stars changed the game, and Director Justin Baldoni makes Will and Sophie the Romeo and Juliet of, literally, ill-fated love. They are bound to machines and pushing through bodily fatigue and suffering to laugh with each other, and you fall for the sweetness of two kids falling in love with the other’s personality.
Cole Sprouse makes Will “the rebel;” bringing a bitterness to him that wanes with the help of Stella. He is talented, charming, but, naturally, angry that he will not live a long enough life to foster such gifts. Haley Lu Richardson plays the more hopeful Stella; who follows the rules in hopes that, one day, she will live a long enough to se a “cure” and get a healthy life. Richardson adds a sweetness and magnetism to Sophie that turns regulars lines into hints for wisdom. She is a great actress and anchors the film with heart and a transformative journey for Sophie that everyone can relate to; you work so hard to live that you forget to actually do it.
The attraction between Stella and Will is so natural because of the chemistry between Sprouse and Richardson. Will is the “one who doesn’t care, but does” while Stella is the “one that cares too much,” but both bring each other balance. Thus, for two hours, you watch a batch of teens play around in a hospital and discover what is the point of life when you are so aware, everyday, that you can lose it. Death is the unnamed character of this film, with Stella, in particular, suffering several tragedies because of him. Yet, Will and Stella’s love story is a lesson that knowing something will end should make you fearless to begin. Five Feet Apart Comes Out March 15
