Every Day could use more soul-searching

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/02/2018 (2251 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you can harness your powers of belief-suspension, the premise of Every Day has a kooky kind of promise.

Based on the bestselling young-adult novel by David Levithan (co-writer of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), Every Day posits the existence of A, a spirit or soul who inhabits a new body — wait for it — every day. Always someone the same age, never the same person twice, usually within an hour’s drive of the last body. A has no control over whose body they end up in — male, female, black, white.

Preposterous, yes, but well established in the lightly supernatural film tradition of Freaky Friday, 17 Again, Big, Vice Versa, 13 Going on 30 and countless others.

Every Day probably has more in common with the soul-swapping romance Prelude to a Kiss, however, because it’s a love story, not a comedy (though God knows it could use more laughs and fewer sun-dappled montages).

Rhiannon (Angourie Rice) is a 16-year-old high school student whose boyfriend Justin (Justice Smith) doesn’t appreciate her… until one day, he totally does.

A has a rule of never disrupting the life of the person whose body is being taken over, but as Justin, he can’t help himself.

He and Rhiannon share an idyllic day at the beach (cue montage) and she shares some family secrets.

Of course, the next day, A is gone and Justin returns to his neglectful ways (Smith nicely transforms from an open, embracing-life guy to a too-cool-for-school shallow dude.) But A can’t give Rhiannon up, tracking her down in body after body — a redheaded “new girl,” a big, bald Filipino boy, a pert, pretty brunette — trying to get her to believe (which takes a remarkably short period of time).

With A’s Instagram account as a communication aid — this is very much a romance in the age of social media — the star-crossed lovers manage to maintain an affair despite A’s daily transformation.

The story of love that goes beyond skin-deep could be profound, but the flaccid film — directed by Michael Sucsy, who covered similar territory in the amnesiac romance The Vow — sells its novel premise short at every turn.

At a time when we’re becoming more attuned to the fact that the way people look on the outside might not match how they feel inside, there’s a real opportunity here to explore ideas of non-binary gender expression.

Every Day only glancingly addresses A’s being as encompassing both maleness and femaleness. Tellingly, despite the fact A is a woman half the time, 90 per cent of Rhiannon’s canoodling takes place with boys; the one exception is with a predictably attractive girl and feels more like “hot lesbian” tokenism than a real take on the complexity of loving someone’s soul, not their gender.

And even if the filmmakers wanted to steer clear of gender-queer storylines, there’s no excusing the relentlessly pretty parade of teens A inhabits. The message of loving someone for who they are, not how they look, is subverted entirely when almost everybody — or more accurately, every body — A wakes up in is Hollywood attractive, not to mention living a life of relative privilege.

Love may be blind, but when A wakes up in the body of a blind boy, he doesn’t inflict that particular body on Rhiannon. The closest Rhiannon comes to lowering her beauty standards is making out with a slightly chubby guy.

At one point, A inhabits the body of a (beautiful) suicidal girl. Instead of using it as a way to talk about empathy or depression, the script tastelessly makes it a temporary roadblock to the couple’s happiness.

That happiness is suspect, too. Jesse Andrews’ banal, empty script does nothing to explain Rhiannon’s singular allure. She’s just a bland, cute blond who reads more books than any modern teen outside the movies, but has no evident hobbies or interests. She laments her lack of connection with Justin, but you kind of feel for the guy: there’s nothing in particular to connect with.

As romance, as social commentary, as a call to “carpe diem,” even as Freaky Friday-style fun — Every Day feels like a wasted opportunity on every front.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier