Early on in writer-director Richard Tanne’s Chemical Hearts, newly appointed high school newspaper editor Henry (Austin Abrams) is given a volume of Pablo Neruda’s sonnets by Grace (Lili Reinhart), a mysterious new transfer student and fellow editor on the paper. We later hear Henry, in voiceover, read Neruda’s 17th sonnet, which, in short, tells of how the narrator’s love for someone is straightforward and without complexities. Not only does the sequence allow the characters to show off their hip literary bona fides, it also inadvertently encapsulates the film’s approach to teenage amour fou.
Through its depiction of the blossoming romance between Henry and Grace over the course of a school year, and Henry gradually discovering Grace’s secret past, Chemical Hearts mostly works to confirm, in broad and careless strokes, that Henry and Grace’s love is, well, straightforward and without complexities. At one point in the film, Grace gently teases Henry for not understanding Neruda’s poem, implying that he interpreted it too literally, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this jab was actually being directed at Tanne himself.
Henry the sensitive, straight virgin is, like Chemical Hearts itself, cut from a very familiar mold of convention that Tanne doesn’t bother to break. The film, so yoked to Henry’s perspective, comes to share his tunnel vision, seeing Grace less as an actual person than as a collection of irresistible personality quirks that appeal to the boy’s desires. Grace bears the physical and psychological scars of being in a car crash that also claimed her boyfriend’s life, but since she’s one of the only girls to ever show interest in him, he only seems to see her trauma, like the cane that she uses throughout the film, as a cute marker of her ostensible perfection.
You may wish that it were Grace at the center of this story, given the anguish she has to process alongside the vicissitudes of adolescence. But the unique experiences of teenagers is rarely on Tanne’s mind, as he’s too busy generalizing about high school experience, as evidenced by Henry’s insufferably starry-eyed narration over snippets of—in the film’s only moment of surprise—a Stan Brakhage short. Which is to say that even he doesn’t escape simplification. For one, though Henry mentions that writing is his passion and that he’s always wanted the gig at the school paper, you rarely see him exercising that passion. His only discernably unique quality is his interest in a Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, a detail that initially feels odd to give more attention to than his writing—until, that is, the hobby is understood as a wincing attempt to add subtext to the story when, during a heated exchange, Grace explicitly tells Henry that he can’t fix her like one of his pieces of pottery.
Toward the end of the film, Henry speaks of how one should pay attention to the lives of others and to ponder their histories. And it’s a statement that feels less like a revelation than an ironic punchline, since Tanne hardly bothers to touch on any aspect of his characters’ lives beyond how they affect Henry. In the end, the missed opportunities that could have been taken up by Chemical Hearts were it more interested in offering a vital portrait of a troubled high schooler lamentably underlines that, like Henry, the film only dwells in superficialities.
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