The Sun Is Also a Star (2019)

The Sun Is Also a Star review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

I normally don’t like to outright proclaim one film is merely inferior to another as a problem with the picture. Yet here I am fighting every bone in my body to not just smash the keyboard dozens of times about how The Sun is Also a Star is merely a lackluster rendition of Before Sunrise, a film which spun a romance over the course of about a day. Here is a film that does the same thing but doesn’t put in enough leg work to make us appreciate the balance of romance and agency. If Before Sunrise was a record romance, The Sun is Also a Star is merely fast-food sentimentality.

I didn’t even have to take a look at the synopsis of this film to know it was based on a young adult novel. You can sense it right away the way the protagonist, Natasha (Yara Shahidi), speaks about life and the universe as though she’d lived the lives of a million. After a tiresome intro to her love for living in New York City, we’re introduced to her as being the daughter of immigrants that are facing deportation soon. And by soon I mean the very next day. Desperate, Natasha strives to find a good lawyer that can keep her family in the country and prevent them from being sent back to Jamaica.

She becomes distracted, however, when she runs into Korean immigrant-child Daniel (Charles Melton), a man with his eye on med school. He has theories about the way the world works and thinks to test them on Natasha, letting her in on his philosophy. One of these beliefs is about falling in love within a day. A unique experiment if this weren’t the very experiment such a story is trying to conceive.

This is a romantic drama that, despite having a ticking clock for both Natasha and Daniel, mostly meanders around in its own meditation on life. Example: In one of the opening scenes of Daniel, he is stuck on the subway due to delays. The subway conductor comes over the speaker and calms the passengers down by stating a late train saved his family’s life considering it was before the events of 9/11. What a deep and depressing thought on the way to work. The later conversations between Natasha and Daniel are mildly intriguing but don’t exactly breed the right sort of chemistry to make the argument that love can be attained in a day. I wonder if either of them has seen Before Sunrise.

There are thankfully plenty of bright spots of drama within this love story that goes beyond the sentimental. I enjoyed the observation of Daniel’s cocky brother being both a jerk and denying his heritage. The bitterness of Natasha about how her case seems to be neglected by her caseworker because, hey, Jamaica ain’t that bad, is rather telling and frustrating of the times. There all these little nuggets of great scenes that sometimes amount to a little more in a rather simplistic picture.

If it weren’t for the injection of culture and philosophy, mild though it is, The Sun is Also a Star would have been a complete drag. Thankfully, it’s only a mildly irritating tale that sometimes hacks enough of the weeds of melodrama to find something more.