Life Sentence is much less effective in making one care what happens to Stella, and especially her family, now that their lives are starting over. Credit series creators Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith with grounding Stella’s more annoying traits - her self-obsession and non-stop babbling - in understandable character backstory so that while Stella might really get on your nerves if she were a person in the real world, she mostly doesn’t on TV. Within the character’s trademark fast-talking chirpiness, Hale has strong comic timing and engages in bits of amusing physical business gamely, while pilot director Lee Toland Krieger and subsequent helmers use her diminutive stature for additional sight gags. Although Sweet November, the Charlize Theron version, is the main referenced Cancer Girl movie here, Hale is practically near-anime twins with Olivia Cooke from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and they bring many of the same assets to the table, starting with those huge, expressive eyes that twinkle in comedy and brim with tremulous tears in tragedy. Were one to craft a cinematic Cancer Girl or a Manic Dream Girl in a Hollywood laboratory, you’d probably come out with something like Lucy Hale. Basically, having not been a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in near-death, she elects herself everybody’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl in rebirth. Now that she’s healthy and basically unqualified to enter the workforce - dying does not afford one opportunities for college, internships or cultivating many skills, apparently - Stella decides the best thing she can do is enable her family. During her illness, though, Stella didn’t do that. Your standard Cancer Girl movie finds the doomed protagonist teaching Ryan O’Neal or Keanu Reeves how to live. Elizabeth hates her job and wants to be a writer. Aiden’s realizing he mostly loves married women. So…now what? Stella’s entire family spent so many years concentrating on her that when she no longer needs concentrating on, it becomes clear that they’ve all neglected themselves.
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