The Half of It (2020)

The Half of It arrives with a pedigree that invites careful handling. Alice Wu wrote and directed a Cyrano de Bergerac for the streaming age, transplanting the old epistolary ache into Squahamish, Washington, where a Chinese-American straight-A student ghostwrites love letters on behalf of a sausage heir with a kind heart and no vocabulary. Netflix released it in May of 2020, into a world with no theaters and a great deal of free time. It spends that time competently.

The central romance is queer, and the film does not treat this as a garnish. Ellie's longing for Aster drives the letters, the deception, the hot spring conversation, and the eventual confession, and her sexuality is the engine of the entire emotional arc. The casting places Asian-American performers at the center of a story that treats immigrant family life as ordinary texture instead of a lecture topic, and the result is one of the more textured portraits of a first-generation teenager in recent streaming memory. The widowed father, quietly dependent on his daughter for both income and translation, is handled with a restraint most films of this size do not attempt.

Where the film asserts its progressive instincts more cautiously, it is on questions of gender and race, both present but subordinated to the love story. Aster refuses a marriage proposal to attend art school. Ellie chooses Grinnell over duty to her father. Small rebellions, staged without a megaphone. There are speeches about love and authenticity, including a climactic church monologue, delivered with an earnestness that stops just short of sermonizing. Nothing here concerns climate, capital, body image, neurodiversity, or the rewriting of history, and the film seems content to let those matters alone. A gentle, well-mannered piece of work. The sommelier notes a soft finish and no tannins whatsoever.