Review by Etan Weisfogel
Netflix’s To All the Boys trilogy, based on Jenny Han’s YA novels, is premised upon a wish-fulfillment fantasy: The awkward, introverted, endearingly dowdy teenager Lara Jean (Lana Condor) becomes the object of three heartthrobs’ affections after the love letters she wrote them for purely diaristic purposes are mailed out by her little sister. But there’s a different kind of fantasy at play in the universe of these films, namely an idealized vision of the high school experience. Adler High is a culturally diverse campus in an archetypal upper middle class suburb, but with none of the tensions that tend to occur in such settings—everyone, it would appear, is basically accepting of everybody, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation. There are parties, with some underage drinking that never gets too out of hand, and no hard drugs. Hunky lacrosse star Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo) is, contrary to what we might expect, a big, goofy sweetheart with an impressive level of emotional intelligence for his age. Even the requisite mean girl is redeemed over the course of the series.
This semi-utopic parallel universe can feel a little phony at times, which might be part of the films’ appeal. They address those uncontroversial difficulties of life—growing older, finding love, managing relationships—in a world much better than our own, where people, despite their flaws, are essentially good-natured and well-intentioned, and where conflicts only occur due to misunderstandings, miscommunications, or relatable mistakes that allow the characters to learn and grow. At a certain point, the films’ perfectly balanced, symmetrical compositions begin to feel almost like Norman Rockwell paintings (though the clearer visual precedent is Instagram’s square frame format for photo sharing)—a picture-perfect imagining of contemporary America.
To All the Boys: Always and Forever, the latest and, presumably, final film in the series, concerns the final months of Lara Jean’s senior year, as she deals with a classic senior year dilemma: choosing between the college she really wants to attend and the one closest to where her boyfriend, Kavinsky, will be going. Spoiler alert: everything works out for the young lovers. Lara Jean picks NYU, and resolves, along with Stanford-bound Kavinsky, to make things work, no matter the distance. If it’s true love, after all, what’s four years of separation?
All’s well that ends well for the graduating class of 2021. That’s right—as Adler High’s Commencement ceremony very clearly indicates, the events of the film take place during the early months of 2021. Yet, there’s no discussion or mention of how, in the interim between their junior and senior year, a global pandemic affected nearly every aspect of life across the globe. The omission wasn’t intentional: the film was shot back-to-back with the previous entry in the series (To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You) in the summer of 2019. But, intentional or not, Always and Forever takes the trilogy’s idealized fantasy world to a whole new level. The film’s message—that, despite life not going exactly as planned, it’s possible to adjust and adapt, to ride out the storm without giving up one’s goals or dreams—actually functions as something of an accidental allegory for the way COVID waylaid so many people’s lives. Yet, such a reading has the effect of flattening out the significance of the pandemic, of portraying the event as a temporary hurdle on the path toward greater progress and growth rather than a woefully mishandled catastrophe whose worst effects were largely preventable, especially in a country with as much wealth, resources, and power as the United States. That, too, is a coincidental resonance: so much of the post-outbreak media landscape has made the same move, focusing on the rather innocuous sacrifices made to maintain the façade of a functioning society without ever mentioning the greatest sacrifice made in that pursuit—over 500,000 lives.
There are likely to be many films produced in the coming years about the effect that the pandemic had on the country—a bevy of documentaries, perhaps an elevated horror update of Repulsion to reflect quarantine isolation anxiety, maybe a procedural or (sorry if I manifest this) an Adam McKay-produced Fauci biopic that gets some awards season traction. But it’s unlikely any of those attempts at capturing the prevailing mood of the times will be as accurate to the American response to the coronavirus as this film, a work which literally exists in a parallel universe where the pandemic never happened.