I hate to give this movie bad ratings, but it felt extremely amateur and poorly put together. I suppose with it being "based upon true events", that the story was a bit limited in it's flexibility. But maybe I'm a bit too used to fairy tale endings that I thought this story might have some sort of more meaningful story arc. It really did seem like it came out of real life because it wasn't some magical ending. The whole story was weird, haphazard.
This isn't a love story. Let's get that straight. That's my first disappointment. There was serious potential for a "star-crossed lover" theme but that didn't happen. It kept hinting at that over and over but the female character kept doing the shallow self-conceited thing to do and ruined the storyline potential.
You have this dysfunctional boy from a severely abusive family, and this popular girl with everything she could want - great grades, money, a big house, a boat on a private dock, etc. And yet she is this horrid person. Through the story you are given the boy's perspective at home with his abuse and you can't help but feel for him, and you start to see a sympathetic/redeeming side to him. But the girl is just too shallow to really develop their hidden bond into anything real. It tears him apart that he bares himself to someone and she just doesn't respond in a way that validates his worth as a human being. So he gets aggressive, cruel, mean, etc and she pushes away. Not a very interesting story. Realistic, perhaps, but if I wanted to see people being shallow to each other, I'd actually go back to high school.
The story telling was just awkward. The actors felt amateur. The music was interspersed at the oddest times, way too much music, too loud, trying to hard to manipulate mood, etc. You start out with the female character in her late 20's, pregnant, and hearing about this old acquaintance that seem to have died.
Flashback to high school, there is a definite tension of his dysfunctional/shock-seeking behavior. The girl is a shallow conceited cheerleader. Nowhere along the line do you show her growing and caring, etc. She ends up being not likable regardless of the fact that she's the narrator. Maybe you were supposed to like her, but I didn't.
The boy and her start with some hump of high school conflict/tension/class-warfare and befriend each other for an hour out of the day in the privacy of study hall. They dare not actually befriend each other outside of anything. She sure doesn't try to be nice to him. She goes on her merry conceited selfish ways while he tries to open up to at least someone who might show some compassion, sympathy, care, let alone some wild chance at love. Not an ounce of any of that. She befriends him secretly but quickly pushes him away and drives him to lash out. If she wasn't the selfish type, maybe he might feel like he could let go of his aggressive obsessive behavior, but she doesn't and it gets worse. In that sense it's maybe a "real life" type of feel, but nobody wants to see that kind of story in a movie theater. It gets uncomfortable as his behavior becomes more obsessive, and she just pulls away.
The weird present-day pregnancy storyline seems to only be thrown in there in some cheese-factor attempt at explaining how she honors this acquaintance of hers, by naming her baby after him. I have to be brutally honest that it feels pretty lame put in the story.
I kept hoping that as the story progressed, that something would show this bond as meaningful, like they hooked up, he happened to be the father of her unborn child, etc. NOPE. The bizarre thing is that there's a scene where after high school he brings up the idea of faking his death. So she spends a bunch of time later trying to investigate what happened, convinced that maybe he isn't dead, but just hiding. However, once she finds the sister, that subplot gets dropped. They chat for a bit, then the scene cuts to her in the hospital with her baby and the sister watching from the doorway. The baby's wristband says the boy's name (as a namesake), and that's it. The end.
I could overlook the cheesy music, the bad acting by the secondary characters, pointless dialog (despite the realism), etc... but the story was just not memorable. It wasn't something that grabbed my attention. I didn't feel like I cared about what happened. Good stories and good movies get you attached to the outcome. This movie did not. The writer/director also happened to play the sister in the film. I can appreciate that she may have put a lot of work into the film but it just wasn't good/captivating storytelling. At all. In fact, there were many instances where the story could have veered off into a different, more interesting and enjoyable direction, and it went in the opposite. The one accomplishment of the storytelling was changing your perspective from liking her and being creeped out by him to caring about him and hating her. Beyond that, it failed. It could have at least explored the futility of star- crossed lovers in this extreme white-trash vs elitest combo, that would have felt more interesting. But the movie didn't even bother trying.
I suppose I got entirely spoiled by watching a star-crossed lover type of film "The Spectacular Now".... and that set my standards really high, I was expecting something similar from this film and felt at a loss with how amateur afternoon-TV-special this felt.
