Okay so I finally managed to see this movie and BOY do I have THOUGHTS. . . . and spoilers, kids, so watch out!
I think this movie, like the book, is a lovely, sensual, touching failure. It has great potential, but unfortunately, the author never bothered to write a climax. Ignore the fact that this story has no developed OS. I’m actually fine with that-- sometimes you just want to create a story that explores deep feelings alone, without argument. You still need to hit all four signposts in your RS throughline, or else you’re going to wind up with a story that feels like it doesn’t have an ending.
I think that’s what happens in this movie. The “ending” where Elio finds out that Oliver is getting married should be the three-quarter mark, at which point Elio should hop on a plane and fly to New York to confront Oliver once and for all over his wishy-washy BS. I say this because otherwise, who changes in this movie? Oliver goes from not pursuing Elio, to pursuing him, to . . . not pursuing him again? And Elio just gives up. Which resolves NOTHING, which in turn is why half the people in the theater looked up in shock when the lights came on during the final scene, like . . . that’s it?
Elio is telegraphed as a steadfast MC. He pursues Oliver from start until the phone call. Oliver is telegraphed as the change character. He pushes Elio away at first, only to give in to Elio’s advances around the halfway mark. Whether this story is supposed to be a “success” or a “failure” is pretty up-in-the air, but even if we get the sense that the author intended a failure ending, he just cut to failure without sufficient confrontation.
After all, WHY, exactly, does Oliver push Elio away? They have this incredible bond, and Oliver walks away from it because . . . internalized homophobia, I presume. Which goes unchallenged. Oliver shows up in Italy wearing his star of David, so forward with his Jewish identity, and yet, for the purposes of this film, he’s a coward. He succumbs to his (implied) fears of being judged for being queer and disappears. How wonderful would it have been to have Elio show up in New York to make Oliver tell Elio to his face that it’s over between them? Not only would this have provided a lovely symmetry (Elio in New York at the end of the movie, being forward about his LGBT identity) to mirror Oliver’s appearance at the beginning, it would actually confront the central issue of the story (i.e. why it is that Oliver and Elio can’t be together.)
That speech that the father gives Elio near the end of the movie substitutes for a climax, but not very successfully. It should be and in fact reads as if it will be a pep talk, a “go get your man” speech, but instead, it turns into a “life sucks sometimes but you’ll always have Paris” speech, which is . . . less satisfying. I mean, seriously, look at what he says: “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.” “I never had what you to have [note present tense].” These should be lead ins to a line like: “so that’s why I bought you this PLANE TICKET TO NYC, kiddo! Go get him back!” But instead, these lines lead . . . nowhere.
And maybe having Elio fly to New York during Hanukkah would seem cliché. A final confrontation between Elio and Oliver is obviously what’s supposed to happen in this movie, but I suspect that the author didn’t write that scene because he wanted to “subvert expectations” or something. Which, like, fine, but you don’t have to worry so much about an ending seeming cliché if your story has a well-developed OS. Because a well-developed OS proves why a story HAD to end the way that it did, not just why it felt like it was supposed to end that way.
None of this is to take away from the film-making, the directing, the cinematography, or the acting in this film, all of which are wonderful. I think they were all just doing their best with a broken (or at least incomplete) storyform, and nobody wanted to implement the kind of major structural overhaul the story required to make it work in the film, probably for fear of offending the author of the book. Which is kind of a bummer, if you ask me. Because this could have been a far more powerful story if it ever bothered to confront the issues it was raising head-on. In New York. During Hanukkah.