Director Josephine Decker has an oddball artistic temperament that is not a match for everyone. For those who like her, she projects a distinctive kinetic energy and comes across as bracingly honest. For those who don’t, she’s like a drama nerd dancing around telling you how awesome drama is, when you hate drama.

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If all these people were divided evenly on a boat, Decker’s new film, The Sky is Everywhere, would be the heavy and stultifying object that falls on the hater side, causing all the lovers to tumble ass over teakettle to join them, before capsizing the boat and drowning them all.

To appreciate exactly where and how much Decker goes wrong with this film, you have to understand a bit where she’s coming from. Decker’s most recent two films, Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley, both feature female characters in a certain amount of emotional distress, who try to find some sort of equilibrium through artistic expression. That’s all well and good.

The same core themes are present in The Sky is Everywhere, as the film concerns a talented high school clarinet player who is trying to recover from the death of her slightly older sister. That’s Lennie, played by Grace Kaufman. Would that Lennie’s emotional difficulties were the result of some intriguing personality disorder, as they are for the title characters in those previous two films. Not that the death of a sister is an unworthy form of sorrow, but that it gets hit so repeatedly over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes that you are practically pleading for release by the end. At least with genuine mental issues you can forgive the endless repetition and the inability to escape loops.

Lennie lives with her grandmother (Cherry Jones) and her uncle (Jason Segel), both confirmed hippies, following the death of her mother some years in the past. Her sister Bailey (Havana Rose Liu) had lived with them, but she died suddenly of complications from an arrhythmia within the past year. (While rehearsing Romeo & Juliet, no less, which is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s fatal romanticism. Wuthering Heights is also frequently name-checked.) Visiting a tad too often is Bailey’s boyfriend, Toby (Pico Alexander), who is understandably also struggling with Bailey’s death. What’s more, he may be trying to find a replacement for Bailey in Lennie, an attraction she unwittingly reciprocates. The one she’s really interested in, though, is Joe (Jacques Colimon), another talented musician and classmate who makes her heart flutter.

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The fluttering in The Sky is Everywhere is usually literal. Decker’s first mistake is to succumb to twee instincts that had largely laid dormant in her before now. Those instincts include magical realism that is supposed to approximate the flights of fancy of Lennie’s brain, or at least that’s what one assumes, and they involve things like slow-mo, characters floating in the air, construction paper bursting forth from an otherwise naturalistic environment, cheeky sound effects, oversaturated colour, somersaulting camerawork, and just about every other design choice that makes you want to take a movie and shake it by the lapels. These techniques might be tolerable if they were remotely fresh, but every glass-half-full filmmaker has tried over the years to brighten our world with superior versions of this stuff, more than a decade and sometimes two decades ago. Decker is better than that.

She may not be entirely to blame. The script was written by Jandy Nelson, an adaptation of her own novel of the same name. Although Nelson would probably never wish this comparison to be made, the material doesn’t rise above the level of other teen weepies we’ve gotten in the past decade, The Fault in Our Stars and such. Those films at least achieve a basic success on their own terms by never pretending to be anything other than what they are. The Sky is Everywhere fancies itself simultaneously more whimsical and more profound, and for that we can probably blame Decker for trying to match herself to material that doesn’t suit her. You can blast viewers in the face with the design equivalent of perfume, but it can’t cover up the stale smell underneath.

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It’s not just the design choices, but what the characters actually do that heightens the shaken lapel factor. These characters write their wishes on leaves. They run through forests. They carry instruments and play music to each other. They compose poetry. They wear bright thrift store fashion that’s too self-conscious by half.

If this were just two hours of unfettered optimism, you might be able to grin and bear it, knowing that one day it will be over. But this movie is all over the shop. Lennie’s manic depressiveness seems to be less in the character and more in the performance by Kaufman. The actress has charismatic aspects that make her casting defensible, but she can’t seem to stay away from the extremities in her choices. She’ll change modes so quickly that you think you’ve missed something in the dialogue. It doesn’t approximate the vicissitudes of a person’s grief; it showcases the misguided instincts of the performer.

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And what could be worst is that it cheapens the legitimate feelings a person might have over the death of a sibling, an experience shared by any number of people in the audience. Movies about grief rarely convince us they are more devoted to exploring that topic by talking about it more. It’s as though Decker had to fit in a certain quantity of references to Bailey – flashbacks to happier moments when she was, you know, alive – to prove the earnestness of her aesthetic goals. Less is more in almost anything, but certainly when it comes to subject matter that is supposed to move us.

The tears Decker is so painfully trying to extract are things that occur organically in other movies, when those movies surprise us with a shift that abruptly reveals the film’s cumulative effect on us. When we are instead suffering from the cumulative exhaustion of no less than a dozen individual moments where Lennie goes off on a crying jag and asks the unseen fairies and wood nymphs why life can be so cruel, the only thing we find cruel is this film we are now regretting having chosen to endure.

 

 

The Sky is Everywhere is currently streaming on AppleTV+.

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