'Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between' is lying to you
Netflix
“Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” is allegedly based on a book. But this paper-thin YA romance feels expanded from a tweet, and “expanded” is an exaggeration. The 76-minute wisp of an 11-year-old’s concept of what a high school senior’s relationship might feel like understands love only as montage and transformation as a recitation of highlights.
Seemingly cast with a “generic cuteness” Instagram filter, Talia Ryder and Jordan Fisher star as Clare and Aiden, who agree on the night they meet to break up before heading to college … and then apparently don’t really discuss that at all until following through on the initial pact’s promise to go out with an epic date that is neither original nor surprising in the slightest (for my money “How I Met Your Mother” nailed this in micro). Which obviously, obviously should not take place on the last night they’re going to see their other friends before they leave too. Ridiculous.
The personalities and relationships feel like watered-down takes on “Booksmart” (I know the “Hello” book was published first, doesn’t matter) and the performances are almost uniformly lousy, like both the characters and the actors playing them know they’re in a movie. (Please watch the far superior and not dissimilar “Along for the Ride” instead.) Figuring out your path as high school turns into something else is a huge, hard thing, and plenty of movies find characters trying to out-think their own emotions as means of protection only to discover that the brain and heart don’t work like that. There is a moment, and maybe just one, that suggests the movie recognizes how narrow our perspectives can be and how essential it is to consider another side before making a big mistake.
The problem is that the above is just material for a throw pillow without legitimate curiosity, and “H,G and EIB” doesn’t ask questions about how Clare and Aiden operate together and then brushes past the challenges it does identify. It just wants to stamp itself sweet and offer not much of anything, thinking that maybe the broad suggestion of connection is the same thing as something real. What a lesson.
D+
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