My book club pick for last month was Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon. A film adaptation directed by Stella Meghie was released in 2017.
The film focuses on seventeen-year-old Madeline ‘Maddy’ Whittier (Amandla Stenberg, ‘Hunger Games’, ‘The Hate U Give’), who is being treated for rare disease called Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SKID).
Maddy lives her life inside a sterile environment never leaving her house – hence why SKID is often referred to as ‘bubble disease’. Her only company is her doctor mother Pauline (Anika Noni Rose, ‘Dreamgirls’), her day nurse Carla (Ana de la Reguera) and the occasional visit from Carla’s daughter Rosa (Danube Hermosillo).
Amandla Stenberg (Maddy)
Carla (Ana de la Reguera)
Pauline (Anika Noni Rose) and Maddy (Amandla Stenberg)
Maddy’s attention is caught when Olly (Nick Robinson,‘Love, Simon’, ‘Jurassic World‘), a cute floppy haired, all dressed in black, skater boy who moves next door with his father, mother and sister.
The boy-next-door Olly befriends Maddy and the two first begin communicating from their bedroom windows and later online, and eventually with the help of Carla are able to meet in person – behind her mother’s back.
The text, email and instant message chat conversations from the book are played out onscreen in imagined life size versions of the architectural models that Maddy creates. This was a clever technique of allowing the audience to see the two characters interacting.
Olly (Nick Robinson)
One of Maddy’s architectural models
Maddy and Olly
Stenberg and Robinson have good chemistry onscreen together, and it is positive to see an interracial relationship presented on onscreen just as it is. The character of Maddy is biracial in the book (African-American and 3rd generation Japanese-American) this mixed heritage representation is unfortunately lost in the film.
Overall the film keeps to the spirit of the novel, and fans of the novel will hopefully be satisfied. But as a film it does fall short.
