| Clare and Aidan’s meet cute is directly out of an unrealistic movie. Aidan is dressed in a white t-shirt and vest and Clare immediately recognizes it as a Ferris Bueller costume. A girl born almost 20 years after the movie came out and has no social circle, and they instantly connect with witty repartee while Jordan assumes the confidence and bravado of Ferris. | | 2022
Directed by: Michael Lewen
Screenplay by: Amy Reed, Ben York Jones
Based on the book by Jennifer E. Smith
Starring: Talia Ryder, Jordan Fisher
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The hook for Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between is that Clare has already mapped out their future before they’ve even kissed. She can’t have a boyfriend because she’s going to Dartmouth next year on her way to becoming a lawyer and no boy is going to get in the way of that. Aidan counter-proposes: what if we do kiss, but just break-up before we have to leave for college? And thus the break-up pact is born.
And then the rest of the movie is just music montages. I’m only half-kidding. This is an 80-minute movie and half of it is music montages of Clare and Aidan reliving all their happy relationship days. There is so little content in the movie it’s hard to imagine what was in the original book. Maybe their relationship was actually built on something in the novel, but in the movie it’s built off of nothing.
Their first fight which also becomes their second fight was over a fart, Aidan doesn’t tell Clare when he applies but doesn’t get into the Berklee School of Music, and when Aidan tells Clare he loves her, she replies with “easy breezy,” and he never tells her and she doesn’t realize how much that hurt him. So now here we are heading towards an ending where one half of the couple is fighting to save their relationship, the other half of the couple is desperately trying to end their relationship with a clean break before college, and the audience is left asking “what relationship?”
Jordan Fisher who has now become a pro at Netflix teen rom-coms and has chemistry with everybody, is once again effortlessly charming. Clare and Aidan also have good chemistry, but that’s all they have. They make googly eyes at each other while some nice music choices play, but I’m not convinced they had a single real conversation with each other ever before this final epic date.
The ending is the only possible ending that fits without completely ruining both characters. Aidan has to make like a 90-degree turn to keep the ending in tact, but the audience can still root for both of them. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between is just such a minimal movie that it doesn’t have enough time to build up a real relationship and all the efforts to make this “epic” fall flat.
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