HENDERSON, Ky. (WEHT) – Premiering on Max, Turtles All the Way Down is an adaptation of Indiana author John Green’s book of the same name. Directed by Hannah Marks, the film stars Isabela Merced, Cree, Felix Mallard, and Judy Reyes. The story weaves three threads involving Aza (Merced), a seventeen-year-old girl growing up in Indianapolis: first is a ham-handed mystery involving the disappearance of a local industrialist, which leads to a love story with the missing man’s son (Mallard). Complicating everything in Aza’s life is that she’s dealing with anxiety and OCD.
The mystery and love story are under-developed plot threads, especially considering the love interest doesn’t get whole lot of development. At one point he whisks her away on her dream trip, and his lack of dimension risks him being turned into a manic pixie dream boy.
All of this is easily dismissed because what works about the story and this adaptation is its portrayal of mental health and OCD. Aza’s struggles with OCD are visually and viscerally rendered with expert acting from Merced and some intercuts of microscopic bacteria that are so small but seem so insidiously large to Aza.
In the history of film and pop culture portrayals of OCD, the two most popular are As Good As It Gets (1997), which won Oscars for Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, and the TV series Monk, which got seven seasons and a movie. In As Good As It Gets, OCD turns the protagonist into a jerk, and in Monk, OCD turns the protagonist into a super-observant hero and a bit of a jerk, but in Turtles All the Way Down, Aza is a smart, introspective character asking interesting and important questions about what parts of her are mental illness and what parts of her are her. These profound questions about the nature of the self are explored with great depth. Go figure that only in the character of a seventeen-year-old girl is a story able to make OCD portrayal profound and philosophical.
Turtles All the Way Down’s fundamental artistic mission is to show that people with mental illness can have, in Green’s words, “rich, fulfilling lives,” and that message resonates throughout the drama. Along the way, the film becomes unapologetically maudlin and saccharine, especially in one monologue when someone tells us “love is both how you become a person and why.” And before you think I’m being cynical about its sentimentality, I’m not: its sentiment is earned and a welcomed antidote to so much of today’s art that’s steeped in irony and incapable of real, earnest feeling.
Ultimately, though two of the plot threads dangle a bit, Turtles All the Way Down wears its heart on its sleeve with a positive, uplifting message. And its availability on Max may mean that more people get to see this lovely, charming film.
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