Director: Hannah Marks
Writers: Elizabeth Berger, Isaac Aptaker, John Green
Stars: Isabela Merced, Hannah Marks, Felix Mallard
Synopsis: A teenager with OCD tries to solve a mystery surrounding a fugitive billionaire.
John Green tends to write books about himself even when they aren’t about himself. An awkward but intelligent teen seeks something more than the suburban life they are living – and suburbia is given an elegiac farewell. That is, if the teen in question lives long enough – but even if they do die, they say goodbye somehow. Beginnings, endings, new beginnings. Thus far, his books have been adapted by men. Josh Boone directed the positively received 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars and Jake Schreier the less successful Paper Towns in 2015.
His most personal work is Turtles All the Way Down which draws on his experiences with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). It also features a young woman, Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced) as the protagonist. In Hannah Marks’ directorial hands, Aza’s struggles dealing with illness, her lasting grief, and her inability to define what is driving her is elevated by Marks’ perspective as much as it is by Green’s.
Aza is a high school student who has a combative relationship with her therapist, her mother, and herself. Her OCD manifests as fear of infection. Her internal narrative is dominated by statistics and facts about bacteria replication and cell structure. The noise (stylized as noise and static) in her brain only needs a tiny trigger and she goes into meltdown mode. Aza can’t stop picking at her scabs, she also can’t manage her compulsions. She doesn’t want them to be her defining characteristic. The push and pull between accepting she is different, rejecting her difference, and externalizing that conflict has bled into most of her relationships. Aza resents her mother (Judy Reyes) because it is easier to target someone who unconditionally loves her than it is to admit her own anxiety about the future. Plus, her mom is the parent who is still around after her dad died suddenly when she was a child.
Aza is bolstered by her best friend since childhood, Daisy Ramirez (Cree) who is freewheeling but also aware of Aza’s illness. Aza feels the most “normal” when hanging out with the slurpy sipping firebrand whose devil may care attitude complements her own incertitude. Aza feels less like a “microbial fiction and bacteria factory” when she’s driving Daisy around in Harold the car singing to OutKast, or taunting the local Applebee’s waitress, Holly (Hannah Marks) with their coupon ordered meals.
It’s Daisy’s bluster and confidence which gets Aza involved in solving the disappearance of corrupt Indianapolis industrialist Russell Davis Pickett because there is reward money on the line. Aza met the billionaire’s son Davis (Felix Mallard) at “sad camp” when they were younger, and he was grieving the loss of his mother. Their clumsy attempt to Nancy Drew the mystery leads to Aza genuinely reconnecting with the increasingly smitten and gentle dreamboat who is stuck in an expensive purgatory. There is no inheritance for Davis or his much younger brother Noah because their father left all his money to Tuatara research.
Davis fits into the conventional non-conventional “Prince Charming” of a lot of recent young adult-oriented romances. His shared trauma and disaffection with the state of his life that makes Aza feel more comfortable sharing her hopes and dreams and honesty about her condition with him. They connect because their “hearts are broken in the same place.”
Davis is wealthy enough to just hand Aza the equivalent of the reward money to her in a box of Pop Tarts for her to share with Daisy. Aza isn’t rich – she and her mom get by despite things not being fancy. For Daisy, whose family is poor, it’s a life changing amount.
Turtles All the Way Down is smart enough to treat its “conduit” characters with respect. It’s Aza’s story, but Daisy and Davis aren’t reductive plot devices who exist solely for Aza to communicate how overwhelmed she is by her fixations. Yes, it’s handy that Aza’s boyfriend has a private jet and can fly her across the country so she can meet a professor (J. Smith-Cameron) she wants to study with one day who helpfully explains infinite regress via the titular analogy. And, yes, Davis’ respect for her boundaries, intellectual, and emotional generosity towards her does border on him being in the “too good to be true” category. However, the film doesn’t forget he is suffering. He and his brother have been made pariahs because of their father’s deeds and, whether they like it or not, they have inherited the Pickett name. Davis must fight for his own survival and that of Noah.
Daisy’s patience is not infinite for Aza. Her romance with Mychal (Maliq Johnson) means the original friendship trio gets unbalanced but she reminds Aza that for years she has done things Aza’s way without Aza even realizing she has been doing it. Aza’s OCD has made her often incurious about other people’s feelings because her feeling are too big. Aza had never read Daisy’s immensely popular Star Wars fanfic, and she didn’t want to support Mychal’s art show because of its location and her disgust with having to interact with “other teens” in a potentially unsanitary environment.
Mental health, especially for teens, can be a difficult topic for filmmakers and writers to discuss with nuance. OCD itself is a complex condition. Turtles All the Way Down manages to explain and destigmatize one of the ways it manifests while admitting that it also makes life hard for the people close to someone with it. Aza’s reality and subjective experience is not dismissed by extending empathy to the people who love her. Aza is greatly loved, but she’s also at times a straight up pain in the ass. The two things co-exist in life. Aza says, “I’d kill to be like normal people,” but some normal people have prisons that are also not of their making.
Hannah Marks’ direction and excellent performances by Merced, Marks, and especially Cree, who is quite the revelation, provide extra substance for Green’s bildungsroman. Turtles All the Way Down is a good yardstick measure for young adult dramas. Get a good cast, try to minimize the cliched dialogue, provide balance – let it be as funny, scathing, messy, sad, and imperfect as the characters are. Daisy tells Aza, “Love, Holmsey, is how you become real.” Real talk? Being real means life is never going to be a breeze, but it will probably be mostly okay if you work on it and you.
