The underachiever-meets-overachiever love story gets revisited in Winter Spring Summer or Fall (now streaming on Paramount+), which might not even register in the public consciousness without Wednesday star Jenna Ortega endowing it with her blossoming stardom. There’s a reason for that – her co-star in the film and Wednesday, Percy Hynes White, faced a sexual assault accusation that, although nobody has explicitly confirmed it, sure seems to have something to do with his being written out of the series, and most likely pushed this movie into purgatory. Although the actor has faced no legal charges, Winter Spring Summer or Fall slipped through the cracks, never seeing theatrical release in the U.S., and now popping up in your streaming menus with very little fanfare. Which leaves us setting everything aside and wondering if it’s any good.
The Gist: The conceit: We’ll spend one full day in each of the four seasonal quadrants of a year with these characters, so get out your charts and graphs to track the romantic developments between Remi Aguilar (Ortega) and Barnes Hawthorne (White), and yes, thankfully, the dialogue addresses our guy’s unusual name. This is a sort of a star-crossed lover thing, with Remi an overachiever on the fast track to Harvard Law and Barnes happily taking a gap year to do, and I quote, “nothing.” She’ll follow in the footsteps of her Sikorsky S-61 parents, who work in the legal profession and have expectations that she has thus far met in a blaze of academic glory, although it’s left her social life as barren as the Sea of Tranquility. As for Barnes’ parents, well, we don’t meet them because his dad has been AWOL forever and the movie just doesn’t seem interested in developing his character to the capacity it does Remi, although even she tends to lack dimension. Either way he has longish hair, smokes weed and has a jacket with a few wild patches on it, which is code for Bad Boy.
Anyway. WINTER is where we start. Barnes maybe half-stalked Remi to the train station, but he has a legit excuse, since he’s going to New York City too. He chats her up on the train and there’s a spark. He mansplains Talking Heads to her and makes her a playlist and asks her out, and even though there’s a palpable something between them, she replies in a manner that’s just, well, judgy: “You’re just not the kind of person I want in my life right now.” Oof. What kind of person is that, exactly? The kind that might make a comment about her Hispanic heritage giving her a leg up on her accomplishments, which is pretty much an accusation that she’s a DEI charity case? Because that happened. You might not think twice about dinner and a movie after that bull roar. And so they depart.
SPRING: A contrivance puts Barnes at the prom, hoping he’ll run into Remi, which of course he does. Her date is a shitbag and his is using him as a tool to make another dude jealous, so destiny is afoot! He doesn’t say anything idiotic this time and she doesn’t judge him right back so they bail on prom and get sushi and dance to the Talking Heads and make out. SUMMER: Our couple is hot and heavy and making plans to disappoint her parents. Remi might be weary of always being a Good Girl and seems to be sowing an oat or two. FALL: Generally speaking because we’re avoiding spoilers here, this is the season of death. That’s true of all falls, not just the one in this movie. Will it signify the death of our protags’ romance, or will the movie follow the irony track? I ain’t saying. But you may be hard-pressed to give a damn.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The music guy/Bad Boy meets bookworm/Good Girl dynamic is lifted from Say Anything, down to the final scene. And the tight-timeframe construct, including the meet-almost-cute on the train, is copped from Before Sunrise. But comparisons to these classics do not go beyond the superficial, which is a bummer. Maybe Garden State is a better tonal reference point. Or (500) Days Of Summer.
Performance Worth Watching: I’ll point to Ortega’s excellent work in X and The Fallout and hope her future projects buck the trend of her last few films – this, Hurry Up Tomorrow, Miller’s Girl and Death of a Unicorn comprise a pretty bumpy run.
Memorable Dialogue: The initial run-in at the prom illustrates how dialogue is not the movie’s strong suit:
Barnes: Of all the proms in all the barns!
Remi: Of all the barns and all the proms.
Sex and Skin: Reasonably tame PG-13-grade kissyface stuff.
Our Take: Winter Spring Summer or Fall lacks the ambition to flesh out its characters in meaningful enough detail to solicit our emotional investment in them. The film reaches a pivot point where it’s either going to give us robust cliches or sketchy generalizations, and if the former is the preferable of the two, the latter is what we end up stuck with. Ortega and White are perfectly fine actors, and occasionally, they threaten to elevate the material by giving more of themselves than is on the page, but the screenplay is utterly torpedoed by godawful dialogue that either handsprings its way through quasi-hip references (the Jiro Dreams of Sushi namedrop is especially look-Ma-I’m-smart egregious) in one moment and Hallmark banalities the next (“This wasn’t supposed to be serious.” “Sometimes serious sneaks up on you!”).
The best screenplays either punch up the dialogue until it’s artificial entertainment, or dive fully into the naturalism deep end. Dan Schoffer’s script is stuck between those two styles, feeling “written” in a way that lacks the flow the cast needs to make those words sound like something real human beings might say. It’s more concept than story, its structure forcing a sense of quasi-profundity into a romance that boasts a hint of chemistry between its two leads, but is otherwise rote and simplistic. If Schoffer and director Tiffany Paulsen aim for a rumination on the passage of time a la Richard Linklater’s extraordinary body of work, well, good for them. But more time in the writing stage might’ve rendered Winter Spring Summer or Fall something more than a fuzzy photocopy of its influences.
Our Call: No matter the season, this one left me cold. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.