Henry the sensitive, straight virgin is, like Chemical Hearts itself, cut from a very familiar mold of convention that Tanne doesn’t bother to break. At one point in the film, Grace gently teases Henry for not understanding Neruda’s poem, implying that he interpreted it too literally, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this jab was actually being directed at Tanne himself. Through its depiction of the blossoming romance between Henry and Grace over the course of a school year, and Henry gradually discovering Grace’s secret past, Chemical Hearts mostly works to confirm, in broad and careless strokes, that Henry and Grace’s love is, well, straightforward and without complexities. Not only does the sequence allow the characters to show off their hip literary bona fides, it also inadvertently encapsulates the film’s approach to teenage amour fou. We later hear Henry, in voiceover, read Neruda’s 17th sonnet, which, in short, tells of how the narrator’s love for someone is straightforward and without complexities. Early on in writer-director Richard Tanne’s Chemical Hearts, newly appointed high school newspaper editor Henry (Austin Abrams) is given a volume of Pablo Neruda’s sonnets by Grace (Lili Reinhart), a mysterious new transfer student and fellow editor on the paper.
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