Even before the pandemic hit, the problems of capitalist America were reaching a boiling point. The opioid epidemic, the ever-increasing wealth gap, homelessness, a mental health crisis especially prominent in teens and veterans; the country is a mess, and the pandemic has only heightened all of these problems. Cherry, the newest offering from directors Anthony and Joe Russo, stars Tom Holland as the titular Cherry and Ciara Bravo as Emily. Cherry and Emily meet in college, and after her own fears about love break the two up, he joins the army. The ensuing film tries to tackle tough subject matter like masculinity, war, PTSD, drug addiction, poverty, and crime, all in two and half hours, but ultimately is bogged down by too many arguments and not enough that are seen through to the end.
The Russo brothers, hot off the success of Avengers: Endgame—the second highest-grossing film of all-time—seem to have missed making striking visual choices that aren’t reliant on computer effects. Unfortunately, they make too many choices: scenes shot in black and white, others with a sepia filter, an aspect ratio change for a portion of the film, text flashing on the screen, and more. There is little to no impact from these visual effects besides a visceral gut reaction to them at first glance. The direction can be summed up in one word: confused. Despite the film’s aim to be a dramatic showcase of tragedy, it’s cut like an action film, with shots lasting short amounts of time and the camera never quite squaring in on the actors but rather the spectacle. The most baffling choice is early on, as if it’s a bad omen: the camera focuses on the faces of Cherry and Emily during a conversation while everything blurs behind them, eliciting a sense of motion sickness as if each part of the shot is moving at a different frame rate. Stylistic choices are exciting when applied to heighten or reveal a character’s emotions; here, they make the film stand out visually with little meaning or consistency.
The script, by Jessica Goldberg and Angela Russo-Otstot and based on the novel of the same name by Nico Walker, feels like several films combined into one incoherent whole. The college romance between Cherry and Emily is generic and empty, while actors Holland and Bravo have little chemistry. When Cherry goes to war, the film feels like a riff on Jarhead; a bank-robbing plotline feels reminiscent of The Place Beyond the Pines; and for a good chunk of the film, after Cherry and Emily become drug addicts induced by Cherry’s own medication for PTSD, it feels like watching a slow, methodical version of the unhinged chaos in the last act of Goodfellas. The film is overrun with ideas and packed to the brim with plot—nothing else. Cherry, as a character, is an interesting concept: a sensitive young man goes to war, and the aftermath of this, along with the struggles veterans face in America, leads him to become a symbol of toxic masculinity. He becomes aggressive and violent, but his core remains the same. He still cries when his friends are killed on the battlefield and when Emily lies next to him in a heroin-induced high begging for more drugs. In the end, though, there is no substantial change.
Holland as Cherry does good work with the material he’s given; however, incessant narration holds back his performance and the film at large. And even when the narration is absent, dialogue explains obvious facts: when a character clearly has a bullet hole in him, we’re told “he’s been shot;” when a soldier’s guts are visibly outside of his body, we hear “his guts are falling out.” Cherry the character is consistent, Cherry the performance is not—Holland plays the character as if he’s in several different films, with wigs and weight changes to boot, even though his actions and feelings remain the same. And maybe this choice is meant to fill in the gaps of a satisfying character arc, or provide deeper meaning, showcasing how a person’s life can be dissected into various film tropes and genres but pop culture is mostly absent, save for a few needle drops, and this arc is familiar enough to compare it to those it emulates poorly.
Meanwhile, Bravo’s Emily is a wasted character. It’s unclear whether Bravo lacks the material to make the character and the romance effective, or if she’s struggling to play the part in general. In the film’s beginning her emotions are incredibly muted, and when Emily becomes an addict, everything is heightened to an absurd degree. Even Emily’s motivation to take drugs as a response to Cherry’s own opioid addiction jumps from Xanax to heroin within a minute. She jumps from one extreme to the other, without any of the substance necessary to craft a compelling character in and of herself. While this may not be Emily’s story, her presence is necessary, even as she falls flat.
Of course, the film has interesting bits. Holland is able to play the character’s sensitivity well; in one scene he’s on the phone with Emily, trying to distract himself from the trauma of seeing the charred corpses of his friends, only to break down in barely-controlled tears. Cherry heightens Holland’s persona as an awkward and sensitive leading man, one not ready for the responsibility thrust upon him, which makes the character much easier to digest. You never forget he’s a fallible person, yet at the same time, the character still feels far too vague. The film’s epilogue section ditches the narration and almost all dialogue entirely to finally follow the show-don’t-tell rule that the film has been lacking; however, it’s a generic montage of Cherry filling out his prison sentence. Cherry wants to be like the great films of the past and present, only without understanding what it is exactly that makes them classics in the first place.
The film somehow tackles too much with a runtime as long as it is. Cherry’s arc never seems finished as he remains sensitive and, to quote Emily, “weak,” long after war, drugs, and fits of violence. Cherry’s PTSD exists only as a motivation but is abandoned as an important trait the minute the two characters become addicts. The representation of the opioid epidemic, which the directors cite as a personal issue they felt the need to tackle in this film, is vague and forgets that at the heart of this crisis isn’t drug kingpins but large pharmaceutical companies and working-class citizens struggling to survive. The smartest observation made in the film comes from Holland’s narration stating that people who rob banks are already in deep enough trouble to do so in the first place—it’s our only insight into the crimes Cherry commits as a systemic, rather than personal, issue.
The most damning piece in the interview above comes when interviewer Devan Coggan asks if the directors had consulted with author Nico Walker on the adaptation of his novel, and Joe Russo answers “I had two conversations with Nico.” Walker, incarcerated at the time, of course wouldn’t be exactly available to work on set, but this is the ultimate flaw with the film. The main character, who is based on Walker himself, is a shell with no family, history, or interests; he exists as many archetypes rather than one character, leaving him empty. This lack of communication with Walker feels exploitative, as if they’ve mined this man’s work for profit while leaving him locked in the inhumane prison system of this country. Maybe this is how the novel is written, but nevertheless, Cherry’s protagonist is a shadow of a real man, and no matter how interesting of a concept he is, he leaves too much to be desired.
Cherry tries to be too many things at once. The directors and writers throw just about every visual effect and genre at the wall to see what sticks, leaving the actors with shaky material filled with too much plot and not enough character. The film is almost always moving and there is no time to catch your breath or understand any of the characters besides the titular Cherry, who lacks a complete arc in the service of telling every bit of the story. The film’s greatest fault is in its impersonal nature, making Cherry feel more like a stylized, drawn-out anti-drug PSA rather than a deeply personal story of someone’s own lived experience.
