The Half of It

 

After 15 years without a film, Alice Wu returns with this charming romantic comedy — yet another variation on Cyrano de Bergerac — in which a closeted, straight-A student (Leah Lewis) living in a Pacific Northwest backwater is hired by a dim-bulb football player (Daniel Diemer) to help him write letters to woo the most beautiful girl in school (Alexxis Lemire). The premise may not be original, but what Wu does with it is. As the duplicitous correspondence develops and the screen lights up with words, text messages, and pictures, we are presented with a precocious teen’s dream of a better world. In most good rom-coms, you fall in love with the characters; in The Half of It, you fall in love with their sheer longing.