“Grief is a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust … that disappears each time someone knocks at the door … where the younger sister will grow older than the older one.”
Lennie knows all about grief. How she wishes she didn’t.
Bailey died a few months earlier, and the inseparable sisters were separated by a fatal heart arrhythmia. Bailey left the world while on stage, reciting lines as Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Bailey was always the brave one, the strong one. She’d coax Lennie to live a little, even when Lennie would’ve been just fine reading Wuthering Heights for the umpteenth time.
Lennie grasps at keeping Bailey close, even in death. She writes a poem on the walls of Bailey’s closet and smells her clothes. She calls up Bailey’s voicemail constantly. When Lennie goes back to school, she wears Bailey’s sweater—the same one Bailey was wearing when she died.
Gram, who raised both Bailey and Lennie after their own mother died, thinks it’s time that Lennie moved on. Well past time, actually. But Lennie can’t imagine a future without Bailey. “I can’t stop thinking that the better one was taken,” Lennie admits. “That it should’ve been me.”
But grief, as strong as it is, doesn’t always quell the pull of life. Lennie might feel half-dead herself, but her heart and hormones say otherwise. She wants to fall in someone’s arms. She wants to fall in love.
Joe seems a natural candidate. He’s funny and cute and a talented musician—maybe the best trumpeter and guitarist in school. (He’s not bad with a clarinet, either, but Lennie’s got the props on that count locked up.) Could it be the two of them could make beautiful music together?
But Toby—Bailey’s longtime boyfriend—is still hanging around Gram’s house in the California woods, digging dirt, caring for Gram’s flowers, moping like a kicked dog. Gram encourages Lennie to talk with the poor guy: “[Bailey] was the love of his life,” Gram reminds her.
Well, Lennie never loved Toby. Never even liked the guy. If the sisters were The Beatles, Toby was Yoko Ono, and Lennie spent plenty of time wishing the dude would just go away.
But now … well, Toby is maybe the only person who really understands how Lennie feels. Being with him feels a little like being with her. And, well, he is pretty attractive.
Oh, she knows any relationship with Toby would be wrong. Like, really wrong. But when attraction and grief come together, the pull can feel pretty irresistible.
If Lennie’s right—that grief is a house—her own house of grief is getting strangely crowded. And it just might come crashing down.
Grief can mess anyone up, and it does a number on Lennie. She abandons the clarinet (an instrument that she’s quite good at) and all the potential opportunities that come with it. She lashes out at those closest to her. And she makes some really poor decisions.
But The Sky Is Everywhere is more than a story of overwhelming grief: It’s about the painful process of moving past that grief—even as it realistically reminds Lennie (and us) that the sense of loss will be, on some level, with her always.
A number of people in Lennie’s life try to help. Gram’s relationship with Lennie is particularly poignant: In Bailey, Gram lost a young woman she considered her daughter. But even in the midst of her own grief, Gram does what she can to help Lennie pick up and move on.
The same could be said for Big, Lennie’s lazy-but-caring uncle, who serves as a source of gentle, uncritical love. He tries to encourage Lennie to ride in his “truthmobile” (in which lies can never be told) and to unburden herself. He goes out of his way to help Lennie patch things up with her beau. He’s a little like a teddy bear: Sometimes the recipient of displaced rage, but always available for a hug.
And then there’s Bailey herself. For years, she’d been Lennie’s driving force—the person who’d push her little sis out of her comfort zone and encouraged her to try new things. “She used to joke my name was, ‘C’mon, Lennie,’” she says. They were very close. And in some ways, perhaps they still are—which we’ll get to below.
When someone dies, those left behind must deal with some complex emotions. We feel the loss and even understand the seeming finality of it. And yet, if we’re people of have faith, we also know that the person who died isn’t gone at all: that the soul goes on.
Lennie embodies that paradox. At one point, she expresses her horror that Bailey’s stuck in an “airless box” as she and others live and breathe, and how unfair that is. But at another, she asks Bailey for a sign. She writes to Bailey frequently—on walls, scraps of paper, the leaves of trees—expressing how lost she feels without Bailey. And by the end of the movie, Lennie’s convinced that Bailey is very much aware of both that grief and those poems.
Lennie and her family seem to observe Christianity to some extent. Bailey’s funeral is held in a church, and Lennie admits to being fascinated by the saints. (She compares nature-soaked Toby to St. Francis, and she sees something of St. Joseph of Cupertino (who is said to have flown) in Joe.
Joe, too, discusses the transcendent. After dealing with loss in his own life, Joe started listening to Bach incessantly. And at one point in the Brandenburg Concerto, he hit a passage that he describes “This one perfect moment. I mean God perfect.”
But different strains of faith make their presence known, too. Uncle Big invites Lennie to come with him to collect dead insects. Why? Because he plans to use “the sacred geometry of the ancient pyramids to bring dead bugs to life.” And when Lennie asks him if he believes in signs, Big says, “I believe in everything.”
It’s said that the roses that Gram grows are magical in the love department. Big suggests that his four marriages are proof. The forest around Gram’s house is, in Lennie’s words, “Literally called California’s enchanted forest.” A clarinet is jokingly referred to as “magic.”
We hear quite a bit about male sexual arousal here: Lennie thinks she feels someone’s erection during a hug, and she spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and texting about it. In the movie’s imaginative interplay between reality and more illustrative flights of fancy, a handful of stars take the general shape of a certain male organ.
We also hear about how a boy discovered his girlfriend in bed with his best friend. Lennie allows a friend to perform a head-to-toe makeover to lure a would-be beau back—including being dressed in a tight, short, red, cleavage-baring dress. (“Aren’t we feminists?” Lennie protests. Yes, her friend tells her, but French-style feminists who are proud of their bodies.) We see a couple of other skin-baring outfits, too.
In flashback, Bailey tells Lennie about the first time she and Toby had sex. Lennie had thought they’d had sex plenty by then; and when Lennie seems unenthusiastic about the confession, Bailey gets pretty mad.
While Lennie’s own relationships with guys don’t apparently progress to that level here, we do see her repeatedly kiss guys both sweetly and passionately. And at one juncture, Lennie listens to music with Joe, which turns into an almost orgiastic experience for both (even though they never even touch each other). “Did we just have sex?” Joe says with a start. “Can we do it again?”
Joe later tells Lennie that he likes her for a lot of reasons, including, “I think you’re really pretty, and I’m incredibly shallow.” Gram tells Joe that both Lennie and Bailey were conceived by a single mother, and that the donor sperm was delivered right to the door. “Like a pizza!” she adds. We see a number of couples—including a middle-age lesbian couple—kiss in a blink-and-you-missed-it sort of scene. There’s a partly heard joke that seems to reference testicles.
[Spoiler Warning] We learn that Bailey had been carrying Toby’s baby at the time of her death, and the two were planning on getting married. We see an act of relational infidelity.
In flashback, we see Bailey’s lifeless body on stage, and later resting in a coffin (as the mortician applies makeup). Big picks dead bugs off a windshield, instructing Lennie not to take any severely injured bugs home. It would be a cruel thing, he believes, to resurrect severely mutilated insects. A house plant is thrown out a front door. A painting is stabbed repeatedly. Someone risks his life to clamber aboard a hot-air-balloon basket. We see a character pretend to stab herself in the chest with drumsticks.
We hear two s-words and a smattering of milder profanities, including “d–n,” “d–k” and “h—.” God’s name is misused nine times, and Jesus’ name is abused twice. An f-word stand-in is used a couple of times.
Big smokes a lot of marijuana—so much so that Lennie eventually calls him out on it. “You’re not in 11th grade!” she says. Gram may partake on occasion, too: We see her dancing in a smoke-filled room as Big inhales. Lennie confesses that when she was younger, she used to take her sister’s heart medicine to be more like her.
Lennie confesses that she gets very nervous during solo clarinet performances—so much so that she vomits before each one. She clips dozens of roses from Gram’s rose bushes (much to her horror) and acts really spitefully and selfishly in other ways. She commits acts of betrayal and runs away from some problems—all of which the movie suggests are part of Lennie’s extended grieving process.
Based on a 2010 book by Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere offers viewers both a coming-of-age romance and a poignant, surprisingly funny take on grief. It’s perhaps an unexpected pairing: shrouds and smooching wouldn’t seem to travel in the same circles. And as a result, this review is a curious mix of the positive and negative as well.
For the most part, this teen-targeted story stays surprisingly on point and steers away from the most egregious content. Our main characters don’t sleep with each other. The language mostly steers away from harsh profanity (with a couple of exceptions).
Moreover, The Sky Is Everywhere just feels both substantial and sweet—like lemon merengue pie. The movie dives into artful fantasy sequences at times, where clouds are made of crumpled paper and people sometimes break into dance. They illustrate Lennie’s mood and take on the world, and they add quite a bit of visual poetry to the story. That, combined with Lennie’s actual poetry, makes this film pretty entertaining—even as it grapples with some grim realities.
But like any good lemon meringue pie, The Sky Is Everywhere can be sour in spots, too.
The focus placed on male arousal is off-putting and, in my opinion, unnecessary. The marijuana tells us quite a bit about its user, but it’s almost waved away by the film as a non-issue. And while the film’s sense of spirituality is interesting and, for many families, navigable, that navigation will take both consideration and conversation.
In some ways, the film feels a little like Lennie’s journey through grief: imperfect, problematic and sometimes regrettable. But in the end, it leads to a more encouraging place.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
