"The storyteller and the story told... somebody's something"
There is nothing more cringe than being a mid-thirties man who loves John Green. And this is coming from someone who just wrote 3,500 words extolling the artistic virtues of the High School Musical trilogy. But for nearly half my life now, I’ve counted myself a John Green fan — both of the books and the man himself — quirks, flaws, and all. If I ever got rapidly famous and wealthy, I’d want to handle it with the humanity and generosity that he has (see: the material impacts he has made in marshaling resources and attention towards reducing maternal mortality in Sierra Leone and combating tuberculosis). He’s probably the only person on Earth I don’t personally know whose fall from grace would both surprise and wreck me. His books were foundational for me in early adulthood, not just because they bridged that gap between “young adult” and “real literature,” but because they convinced me that maybe that distinction was never necessary in the first place.
In fact, you might not be reading this if not for him. During a particularly brutal creative drought of my life, it was Green’s books that nudged me back into writing — both fiction and non-fiction. His writing directly inspired me, and in the early 2010s, I drafted three YA novel manuscripts plus various other chapters and outlines (all of which will remain unpublished). And somewhere in that process, I started blogging about music and movies and TV again with more purpose, and around 2020 that evolved into writing and podcasting about movies under the banner of The Goods.
Green’s novels run the spectrum from quite good to near-masterpiece. They’re all flawed, but always in ways that feel human and earnest rather than lazy or hollow. But as much as I treasure his fiction, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with its adaptations. It’s not that they’re bad, exactly. If anything, that’s the problem: they’re fine. Decently faithful adaptations rendered with decent craft. But they inevitably sand down the best parts of the books. You see, Green is a pretty literary writer despite his teen audience and contemporary setting — you don’t really read them for the plots but the voice and the language and the piercing portraits. His novels are structured around characters discovering something about themselves moreso than going on adventures (though all of his stories include at least some journeying). The narratives are amorphous, sometimes even wonky, but the prose soars. Onscreen, what we’re left with is a flattened rendition, brought to life by real actors and production but inherently less literary. The symbolism turns into scenery. The quirks become exposition or throwaways. It’s like watching a YouTube video of a sunrise to try and get Robert Frost — the gold doesn’t stay, but it’s not the same.
Which brings us to Turtles All the Way Down, both Green’s most personal and most formally resistant novel (and, to date, his last fiction book). It’s a story that unfolds entirely in a teenage girl’s anxiety-riddled interior, filled with associative leaps and symbolic heft. It does have a romance and a mystery, so it’s not anathema to screen, but it’s his story that least fits a three-act structure. The film version, directed by Hannah Marks, does about as well as any adaptation could at adhering to the source within the confines of a Max streaming original. At its best, it’s compassionate and sharply observed and even moving. At its worst, it’s narratively lumpy and opaque, but that was inevitable for an adaptation of a novel that’s so interior.
The story centers on Aza Holmes (Isabela Merced), a sixteen-year-old girl living in Indianapolis, navigating daily life with obsessive-compulsive disorder while trying to be a semi-functional teenager. Aza spends her days ping-ponging between school, therapy, and driving her friends around town. Her waking hours are defined by increasingly invasive “thought spirals,” particularly about her microbiome, and what its existence says about her ownership of her own body and self-identity. She is fixated on fear of C. Diff specifically, a bacterial infection she’s convinced is festering in her body. When her best friend Daisy (Cree née Cicchino) learns that a local Trump-resembling billionaire has gone missing, Aza gets roped into a half-serious search quest — not least because the billionaire happens to be the father of Davis (Felix Mallard), a childhood friend with whom Aza has unresolved feelings. There’s a $100,000 reward on the table, but also a whole mess of emotional baggage and moral friction. As the mystery deepens, Aza’s sense of control begins to fray.
All of this is deeply personal for Green. Aza’s OCD isn’t a metaphor — it’s his. He’s talked at length about living with the condition, and Turtles was his first attempt to write about it directly. Davis, the quiet and lonely boy wrestling with wealth he didn’t ask for and can’t really use, also feels like a reflection of Green’s uncomfortable relationship with his own success in the wake of The Fault in Our Stars astronomical sales. Daisy, the exuberant best friend who writes Star Wars fan fiction and uses fiction to reframe a life she can’t always control, is Green again — the part of him that turns inner turmoil into outer story. And the story is set in Indianapolis, Green’s adopted hometown. Green finds meaning and beauty in its unremarkable neighborhoods and dirty river.
But you don’t even really need that context for Turtles to work. These characters are also archetypes, and their struggles are broader than Green’s biography. There’s something timeless about the way this story maps teenage alienation onto physical space and mental illness. Aza is trapped in her own brain as much as her body; surely any teen can relate to some extent. Davis is rich in every way but the ones that count, and we all miss our own blessings and focus on our faults. Daisy dreams of galaxies far, far away while struggling to deal the mundanity of lower-class life. The central mystery — the missing billionaire and his obsession with ageless tuataras — is a provocative take on “you can’t take it with you.” These kids are surrounded by shadows: of dead parents, of traumas both ordinary and extreme, of futures they only have partial say in. And those shadows are tough to articulate outside of the written word.
Director Hannah Marks — whose past work I’ve covered before and whose direction and sensibility I’ve admired even when her stories have been hit-or-miss — does a thoughtful job translating all of that internal noise into something cinematic. She neither overexplains nor streamlines too much. Instead, she builds recurring visual motifs, especially during Aza’s “thought spirals,” which are depicted in brief, unnerving montage sequences that keep us close to Aza’s subjective experience. Even beyond that, Marks understands what can and can’t really be resolved in a movie that stays true to the book. It’s a really delicate tonal balance, and the movie mostly pulls it off, though I have no idea what someone coming in without having read the book might think.
The movie as a whole is very generous in spirit — to its characters, to its source material, to its audience. It assumes (correctly) that many viewers are here because they already are bought in. It is one “for the freaks,” I say with affection. For Green Easter eggs, it includes nods to The Fault in Our Stars and even a brief homage to The Anthropocene Reviewed, via a brief quote of Green’s essay on Auld Lang Syne and his mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The podcast episode of Green narrating that essay wrecked me when I first heard it — it’s a small, heartbreaking piece of writing that had me crying full-on tears.
Performance-wise, the movie is a mixed bag with a few standouts. Isabela Merced, currently getting buzz for her role in The Last of Us season two, carries the brunt with some real-ass acting. Her Aza is sweet, but never cutesy, and goes to some real dark places before the story wraps. Cree is maybe the biggest surprise — funny, decent dramatic chops, and entirely at ease on screen. I pray casting agents watched this and we start seeing her more. Scrubs vet Judy Reyes is fine as Aza’s mom. And Felix Mallard, as Davis the romantic interest, is… undeniably onscreen. He’s conventionally handsome and convincingly sad, which is about all the movie asks of him. Green and Marks both show up for cameos. Marks plays a waitress, while Green (semi-famously cut as a cameo from The Fault in Our Stars because his takes were so awkward) gets about 2 seconds as a PE teacher.
So how do I feel, overall, about Turtles All the Way Down as a movie? Honestly, as with many adaptations of stories I love with very specific voices, it’s really tough for me to articulate a specific rating. “Good” or “Very Good” always seems right. As a fan of the book, I think this is probably the most faithful and emotionally accurate adaptation of Green’s work we’ve gotten in film form (the Looking for Alaska miniseries probably tops it). But that fidelity comes at a cost: it’s so beholden to the novel that it never escapes as its own object the way that The Fault in Our Stars does. Davis, in particular, feels like a leftover trope — the emotionally available dream boy — and without the book’s sharp voice, his arc plays like a wish-fulfillment template rather than a lived-in person in conversation with Aza’s various emotional arcs. The film doesn’t quite make a case for itself as a standalone piece of cinema. But my heart was warmed. I heard Green’s turns of phrase and felt the complexity of life that thrums in his stories. And for me, that’s enough.
- Review Series: Hannah Marks
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.