I like how director Stella Meghie brings to life Maddy’s architectural models of a diner and a library as she imagines that her text message exchanges with Olly are face to face conversations taking place in life-size versions of her creations. There is even a kindly nurse a la Shakespeare named Carla (Ana de la Reguera), who acts as their sympathetic go-between and goes so far as to let Olly into the house after he promises to keep a safe distance from Maddy (fat chance). ![]() ![]() Then Olly writes his cell phone number on his pane, and soon they are whispering sweet text messages to one another at all hours of the night. They initially bond over silly pantomimed jokes at the expense of a misbegotten bundt cake baked by his mother and rejected by Pauline since, you know, germs. In what seems to be a clever play on the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet,” the love-struck pair can see into each other’s bedroom window and communicate by various means. But then new neighbors move in and, lo, Maddy spies Olly, the super-cute skateboarder next door, who makes eye contact and waves as she peers through glass. Soon after, Maddy got terribly sick and that was that. She is especially cautious since her husband and a son died in a car accident years ago. Luckily enough, single mother Pauline ( Anika Noni Rose of the film version of “Dreamgirls,” a Tony winner whose abilities are at half-tapped here) is a caring doctor who tends to all her daughter’s health needs as well as a vigilant warden who makes sure she is never exposed to harmful elements. The hermetically-sealed contemporary abode in Los Angeles features plenty of spacious windows so that Maddy can at least pretend she can connect to the world beyond her laptop-something she hasn’t been able to do in 17 years. ![]() But a female version is a rarity and the so-called bubble in this case could pass as something out of a high-end décor magazine for medical patients. There have been “bubble boys” on TV ( John Travolta in 1976’s “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” and that sore-loser Trivial Pursuit player on “Seinfeld”) and in movies ( Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2001 dramedy “Bubble Boy”). As a result, she is allergic to the outside world and must live in an antiseptic environment (complete with a stylish mostly white and certainly organic wardrobe). The malady in question? Maddy is a “bubble girl,” meaning that she suffers from severe combined immunodeficiency aka SCID.
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