If you’re going to rip off a teenage classic, you could do a lot worse than Say Anything. Cameron Crowe’s 1989 rom-com solidified the John Cusack persona in general, as well as the specific image of the actor, half-yearning and half-stalking as underdog eccentric Lloyd Dobler, holding his boom box aloft outside the window of Diane Court (Ione Skye), the overachieving valedictorian he improbably but successfully woos. If the similarly shiftless but likable Barnes (Percy Hynes White) were to do the same for the similarly poised and brilliant Remi (Jenna Ortega), he would likely be blasting Talking Heads, the subject of an early conversation between the two on a train into New York City from New Jersey. Instead, in an unavoidable sign of the times even for a semi-old soul like Barnes, he makes her a Spotify playlist. (And, unlike Lloyd and Diane in Say Anything, their first sexual encounter occurs offscreen – so we’re not sure what, if anything, soundtracks it.) A free-thinking 2020s-era teenager who happens to love the same music as the presumably adult screenwriter who constructed him encapsulates everything appealing and irritating about Winter Spring Summer or Fall, a movie full of heartfelt contrivances.
The two strangers – semi-neighbors, in that Barnes spends a lot time with his cousin, who lives across the street from Remi and attends high school with her – meet at wintertime on that train ride; their paths cross again at Remi’s spring prom; and then their relationship evolves for two more seasons, nicely evoking the passage of time and also letting the audience know that they won’t have to linger too long in any particular section if they start to get repetitive. Remi is, naturally, resistant to Barnes at first, but eventually gets a taste for life that hasn’t been meticulously planned out – and the movie smartly avoids some of the attendant clichés about living life to the fullest that seem to be coming down the road.
Dan Schoffer, that presumed Talking Heads fan of a screenwriter, boasts the unique distinction of having a previous script produced twice, via the obscure reality series The Chair: His story about a group of friends and acquaintances returning to their hometown for the first Thanksgiving break during their freshman year of college was shot as Hollidaysburg, a reflective, melancholy dramedy, and as Not Cool, a horrifyingly smarmy amateur-hour sex farce. Winter Spring Summer or Fall hews much closer to the former, and even fits with it chronologically: In terms of the calendar, it ends a few weeks before Hollidaysburg begins.
Director Tiffany Paulsen also has a calendar-based movie on her filmography; she wrote Holidate, the synthetically Netflixy year-round rom-com. This one has more sustained, more substantial moods, based on the mysterious, unexpected rush of first love and heartbreak. 35 years on, that Say Anything attraction between a good girl (experimenting with going, if not bad, at least maybe less perfect) and a sensitive guy (whose background might suggest a bad boy who never materializes) is pretty irresistible, especially with Jenna Ortega – so often cast in precocious roles – playing the brainiac with undiscovered edges. She and White already worked together on Wednesday, and they’re cute enough together that all the cute stuff the movie tries to gussy up around them – especially in the final section, where Barnes finds counsel and bad rom-com tropes with a band he admires – turns into overkill.
Winter Spring Summer or Fall is also more than a little cheap-looking, with some wholly unconvincing New York transit non-locations and a hospital waiting room that looks like the hallway of a movie’s production offices. Minor details, to be sure, but they do help undermine the movie’s attempts to ground itself somewhere reality-adjacent. (And some of these are successful: There’s a funny moment, for example, when a customer at the restaurant where Remi works gets impatient with her staring at Instagram on her phone, then allows himself to get sucked into her drama, however briefly.) Say Anything is an improbable, borderline fantastical love story that feels utterly true. This variation is more believable on paper, yet ultimately plays like moon-eyed fantasy.
Director: Tiffany Paulsen
Writer: Dan Schoffer
Starring:Jenna Ortega, Percy Hynes White, Marisol Nichols, Adam Rodriguez
Release Date: June 8, 2024 (Tribeca)
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including GQ, Decider, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.
