Chemical Hearts (2020)

Chemical Hearts has a very short attention span and requires that the audience has the retentive memory of a gold fish as well. This is a movie in which a sheet of paper is subjected to the flame of a lighter and later reappears taped together as if it had been torn and not burned.

Henry Page (Austin Abrams) is a high school senior who aspires to be the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper so that people know his point of view, although he himself admits that "what good is a platform if you have nothing to say". Coincidentally, producer/director/writer Richard Tanne has the same problem; he has the medium but not the content.

Henry and Grace Town (Lili Reinhart) are both vying for the editor job, though apparently no one bothered to tell her. When they are offered to be co-editors, Grace is not interested and walks away very slowly – she uses a cane and is also distant and sullen; she's basically the female, teenage version of Dr. House.

Henry walks her home and tells her that the poem she was reading earlier, which he rudely reads over Grace's shoulder, is "beautiful." She replies that that is what someone who did not understand the poem would say. This makes Grace a hypocrite, since they are talking about an English translation of a Neruda poem.

Henry lives much farther from the school than Grace, so she gives him a ride, or rather, he gives her a ride to his house in her car, which they leave parked in front of his house, to be picked up later by someone who is presumably her father.

So Grace walks with a cane and doesn't like to drive. Do you think she was in some sort of car crash? Is the sky blue? Henry continues to bum rides off her; he must think Grace's dad or whoever that guy is has nothing better to do than pick up her car later.

The nonsense doesn't stop there, though. She goes to the school's football field for a nightly workout on the track when no one else is around; oddly, the lights are on like it's game night – do they always leave the lights on all night or do they turn them on just for her?

As for Henry, his hobby is breaking vases and gluing them back together; this of course is a clumsy allegory for his effort to "fix" Grace. She tells him that she doesn't need to be fixed, but then her motto is "serva me, servabo te" ("save me and I'll save you"), so mixed signals, anybody?

All things considered, Henry and Grace's relationship is destined to fail because 1) he is a wimp, and 2) she is one beer short of a sixpack, the light is on but no one's home, she's crazier than a sh-thouse rat, etc etc. It doesn't help either that they're both in their twenties pretending to be high school students, which makes it very difficult for us to believe that this is only Henry's first love and Grace's second.

Aug 29, 2022