As the movie opens, we are introduced to Stella Grant and her girlfriends, doing what most seventeen year olds do, gossip, eat junk food and hang out in a bedroom with walls covered in posters. As Stella’s friends leave, the camera shows us the bedroom is actually a hospital room and dozens of medication bottles replace the French fries.
We soon learn, Stella has been battling cystic fibrosis, a deadly genetic disease that clogs the lungs and passageways with mucus, since birth. She is currently in a specialized hospital fighting an infection, but is well aware her only hope is a lung transplant. She finds peace in being obsessive in tracking her medications and therapies, always documenting thru her journal and her You Tube channel.
Stella’s structured, OCD style is thrown for a loop when Will Newman arrives to participate in a clinical drug study for his rare aggressive form of CF (cystic fibrosis). It makes the OCD in Stella crazy that Will is not taking full advantage of the opportunity given to him. Will is the cynical, “Lighten up it’s just life. It will be over before you know it” kind of guy. Another one of his lines “We don’t have time for delicacies, we are dying.” Will is just a bit morose, right?
Stella challenges Will to take control of his medication, and soon he and Stella become a modern day Romeo and Juliet of sorts, kept apart by CF. and the ever present nurse Barb. They wander the hospital (which looks like a Hilton) meeting at the atrium, hanging out on the snowy roof, and swimming off hours in the hospital’s Olympic size indoor pool. They even hold a secret birthday dinner party in the closed cafeteria with lobster and champagne. I know what you’re thinking….don’t worry they have they portable oxygen tanks at all times. That is what you were thinking right?
All CF patients are educated to give each other a wide berth, six feet distance, from each other as there is a high risk of cross infection. Keeping six feet apart, never holding hands or touching is exceedingly hard for anyone, let alone seventeen year olds facing a deadly disease. Stella and Will get around this by showing each other their surgically scarred bodies and silently expressing their fears and loss.
Stella decides to take control of her OCD, and the six feet benchmark becomes a five-foot pool stick. They walk the halls of the hospital, each holding an end of the stick, five feet separating them. She finds herself falling in love with Will, but she is well aware of their less than promising future.
To not only having a “normal” youth taken away from Stella, knowing she would never be able to touch her beloved Will, almost takes a tragic turn in the last few minutes.
This could have been a real sugar coated ending, but thankfully the writers didn’t go that route.
Excellent casting in Haley Lu Richardson as the organized and structured Stella, and Cole Sprouse, as pessimist Will. Five Feet Apart, with it’s casting, is targeted to a younger audience. But you don’t have to be twenty something to appreciate this movie, our audience members was “mature”. Based on the underlying seriousness of the story, I would not recommend this to tweens.
Yes, there are cliché’s, and don’t think too much about how the characters wander in and out of the “Hilton” hospital (I never saw a security guard). Five Feet Apart is rated B, bring some tissues, you’ll need them.
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