Sunday, March 25, 2018

FILM REVIEW: Midnight Sun (2018)

Directed by Scott Speer

* * 1/2


Seeing the advertising for Midnight Sun, it was evident that I was going to be most likely getting sappily tearjerking melodrama for young audiences. Yes, this is what I got, but it wasn’t too bad this time.  Midnight Sun at least knew when it was time to lighten up on the contrivances and be serious about its subject matter. That said, those contrivances are still present, and combined with distracting tonal imbalance, Midnight Sun is not a satisfying movie overall, but it was riveting while it lasted.

17 year old Katie (Bella Thorne) has lived her life indoors– she is afflicted with xeroderma pigmentosum, a condition that makes her skin hyper-sensitive to sunlight. If she is exposed to even the slightest bit, it could be potentially life-ending. Thankfully, Katie is the kind of person who always sees the positive in everything, so life isn’t too painful for her. The weight of her affliction is made all the lighter by the two closest people in her world: her widowed father Jack (Rob Riggle), a jolly and good humored man in spite of everything, and Morgan (Quinn Shephard), her best friend since childhood

Daytime is off-limits for Katie, but nighttime is free-for-all (in spite of her curfew). She enjoys playing her own music on guitar at the local train station. Meet Cute incoming: one day a strapping young lad by the name of Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger) passes by, stricken by Katie’s music. She is forced into quirky awkwardness in his presence: Charlie lives just down the street from Katie, and she has longingly watched him out her window for the last 10 or so years. In spite of the initial awkwardness, they both see something in each other.

There is a fascinating dynamic between these two, as both are characters who have been confined their entire lives in some way or another. We’ve already established Katie’s confinement, but then there’s Charlie: he has been swimming competitively all his life, but an injury has prevented him from continuing. His friends are eager for a life of partying, but Charlie doesn’t seem interested – while not happy about the injury, he seems somewhat excited to see what else life offers beyond the water. This dynamic is kind of pushed to the side, unfortunately, as the movie is more concerned with glistening the audience with their radiant romance. It’s not eye-rolling, but the romance would be so much stronger with the dynamic further cemented.

One might call this a catalyst for the film’s primary issue: it is concerned just enough with the issues it tackles (and tackles them seriously), but is still just slightly more concerned at appealing to its audience, as if it’s keeping the drama in frame, but only in the outer edges, because the colorful radiance has more priority and fills up the grand majority of that same frame. In turn, the film loses a portion of its potential power. Luckily, not all of it is lost.

The performances help, at the very least. Thorne may leave just a little bit to be desired – there’s the slightest sense of disengagement from the drama (and I meant the absolute slightest), but it’s clear that she’s giving it everything she’s got. Patrick Schwarzenegger’s not too much to write home about, but he’s got a nice charm to him. Quinn Shephard is absolutely wonderful as the zany best friend.

And then there’s Rob Riggle, who deserves an exclusive paragraph in this review (and not just because I love Rob Riggle).

There is a masterpiece that lies within Midnight Sun, and that mastery shines when we cut to Riggle as Jack, Katie’s father. Jack is a man who once had two people mean so much to him, but now there’s only one after the death of his wife (and that “one” is bound to meet her ultimate fate so much earlier than she should). He wants so dearly to hold on to her as tightly as possible, but doing so would not only be insufferably overbearing but also denial of the tragic inevitable, so Jack carries on with a well-intentioned but ultimately artificial jolliness. Riggle handles this role so unbelievably well that I wish the entire movie was about him. Not because the movie is bad, but because this is great drama that is so beautifully acted (especially considering it’s a role you wouldn’t expect somebody like Rob Riggle to handle).

But that’s not the movie we got. What we got instead wasn’t a bad movie at all, but definitely subpar. The imbalanced tone really doesn’t help things at all, and is probably the biggest offender. Take the opening scene, for instance. Moody ambient music and pretty cinematography fill the scene while Katie narrates her dilemma. Her tone of voice, on the other hand, has a quirky upbeat quality to it. Granted, that is her character, but it doesn’t fit the tone of everything else. This frequent muddled teeter-tottering of tones is prevalent throughout, and it’s quite distracting.

While Midnight Sun does hit many of the tropes you’d expect in a film like this, it’s at least not overbearing, but is still there and can be eye-roll inducing at times. Katie plays her guitar in a huge public space for the first time; practically the entire block fills up within seconds of the song (and the way this is shot, you’d think they were advertising an upcoming hit single). Stuff like that, but the worst example is actually at the very end. I won’t spoil it, but it’s an unrealistically grandiose testament to Katie’s legacy.

While I may have scoffed here and there, I can say that I was very involved in Midnight Sun. I look forward to seeing the talents of the leads bring next (and I certainly can’t wait for more drama from Riggle). I’ll even admit that my eyes may have watered a bit once in a while – it just never brought about actual tears that it could have brought.


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