As if coming of age in the era of 9/11 wasn’t bad enough, imagine losing your sister on the very same day. No, not in one of the towers, in a totally unrelated – and totally preventable – traffic accident. It’d certainly be traumatic – you’d feel like the rabbi in that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode who claims his brother-in-law died in New York on September 11th. His brother-in-law certainly did die in New York that day – being struck by a bike messenger.
So how’s young Tess (Sadie Sink) to cope? Well, she moves back in with her dad (Theo Rossi, who was excellent as Shades in Luke Cage), gets a job at a local amusement park, tries to deal with the soul-crushing poverty, and slowly falls for her neighbour, a downright skeezy-looking, yet sweethearted bloke named Jimmy.
All of this is detailed in a series of letters to the deceased Zoë, a device that may well have worked in the YA novel on which Dear Zoë is based, but which fails to really provide the structure that is desperately lacking in the film, as Tess sort of bounces around through life’s ups and downs until the credits roll. Further, it amounts to having lots and lots and lots of narration, which rarely serves a film even when used sparingly. We don’t need to have all of Tess’ thoughts and feelings spelled out to us this way – it does a disservice to the strong acting from Sink and the rest of the cast who, being professional actors and all, are capable of conveying that stuff through their performances.
In all it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Dear Zoë is too respectful of its source material, as if someone felt that altering the novel in any way – adapting it to let it work as a film, and not a book – would be sacrilege.
★★★☆☆