The further we go through John green’s catalog of novels into film adaptations, I’m realizing this guy wrote one really great book, and some just OK books that keep getting adapted anyway. Probably the second best adaptation I’ve seen of his work was looking For Alaska, which had the benefit of being a limited series and expanding upon the material and really getting everything in there. Turtles All The Way Down is emotionally manipulative, with a few strong performances, and also has parts that just don’t work.
the meat of the story revolves around a teenager (Isabela Merced) who is getting to that stage where college is the next logical stage. She seems bright, but she clearly has a medical history, lots of fears and struggles, most of it stemming from an overwhelming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This is almost like a project written for people who joke about having OCD, when they really don’t to show what living with OCD is actually like. She thinks with medication and therapy she’ll be fine, and eventually meets a rich kid whose dad is on the run from the government, and joins him and his younger brother on a fact finding mission of where he might be. Yes, seriously.
But at the heart of the story is a girl struggling with mental health, who clearly wants more out of her life, and her mother (a rather fantastic Judy Reyes) who struggles to give her daughter just the right amount of trust, but also is very concerned and observant about her behavior. I’m not saying this is a bad film, and Green wrote something here that has the potential to be powerful, but there’s this stupid plot about finding this rich guy that doesn’t even get resolved. It’s not some huge mystery, it’s a distraction. The boy is a distraction. This film should be better structured, and it’s just this thing that had so much potential, but merged with some other film and partially absorbed its plot only to not even make it a core function of the story. The title, which is so random, is just a line someone says late in the film. It really has little meaning, and says nothing about what the film is about. Of course, really most of John Green’s titles are so cryptic that you would need a World War II code breaker to figure them out.
The audio description by deluxe, narrated by Nicole Sansorella, is deceptively difficult as we get these weird bursts as Merced tries to process her thoughts. So, these odd visual images that have no real world application but are tied to her thoughts flash on screen, with some frequency, whenever she’s trying to process life. There’s also a car accident that is well described. But, like most John Green novels, it is set in modern times, with teens who are pretty typical teens but have some weird quirk that makes them worth writing a film about.
It’s a messy concept, and a messy script, but a strong lead performance from Merced, and another one from Birth/Rebirth standout reyes, make this worth watching. Plus, it gives a much better representation of real OCD, than that one friend you have who just says they are OCD all the time.
Final Grade: B-