The Fault in Our Stars

With each movie I see her in, I find myself more drawn to Shailene Woodley as an actress.  Even though she mainly appears in mainstream teen films (her last film, and now this, are both based on Young Adult novels), she does not go after roles that portray her as a simplistic heroine or damsel.  Her performances are thought out and often complex.  In The Fault in Our Stars, she plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, a young cancer survivor with a sarcastic tongue (which helps her appeal to adults) and a deeply romantic heart (which helps her appeal to the teen girl demographic the film is after).

Young readers who have made John Green's novel a runaway best seller can rest easy with this film adaptation.  It's a surprisingly faithful retelling, with little cut out or sacrificed.  Just like the book, the movie is a mostly successful and simplistic romantic fantasy, with likable characters and a quick sense of humor that prevents it from being the garden variety tearjerker it easily could have been.  What the movie adds are two very good lead performances from Woodley and Ansel Elgort, both of whom appeared together in Divergent back in March.  They get more screen time together here, and show some wonderful chemistry.  Any problems I have with the narrative (there are some truthful moments throughout, mixed with some heavy handed manipulative ones) are carried over from the source novel, so I can't really blame the filmmakers.  If anything, I can only complement them for finding a strong cast that helps make these characters seem more believable to me than they were on the written page.

Hazel (Woodley) and Augustus "Gus" Waters (Elgort) are different from your usual teens, in that they are well aware of their mortality, and both know that they are not long for this world.  They live in worlds where their parents constantly fear about them, and they are identified more for the diseases they carry, than for who they are or their hopes.  They have both come to terms with their circumstances.  This is not a story of teens realizing that they're going to die sooner than they'd like, as they have realized that long before the story opens.  Instead, it's a story of these two coming together, and trying to have a normal romance with each other, despite everything standing in their way.  For the most part, the film handles this in an honest way.  It's only during the last half of the movie that the manipulations start flying left and right, and you get the sense that director Josh Boone is desperately trying to wring tears out of his audience.

The two meet at a cheesy church support group for teens going through cancer.  Hazel is forced to lug a small oxygen tank around with her to prevent fluids from filling her lungs, while Gus seems to be in remission from his cancer, despite the fact that he lost a leg from the disease, and is only in the group to support a friend.  The two strike up a conversation outside of the church after the meeting, and build an instant bond.  Before long, they're exchanging text messages, having lengthy and flirty conversations on their phones and in person, and sharing books that are important to them.  For Hazel, that book is a story of a girl fighting cancer written by a reclusive author named Van Houten (Willem Dafoe).  When Gus arranges for them to take a trip to Amsterdam to meet the author, the two bond even closer, and begin to fall in love, even though Hazel is strongly against the idea.  She knows that she is going to die, and doesn't want to be a "grenade" that will destroy Gus when the inevitable happens.

I'll understand if after reading that you bush off The Fault in Our Stars as yet another teen melodrama.  What does help set it apart is that the movie is somewhat self-aware, and manages to poke fun at some of its own conventions, and features characters who are a little brighter than the norm.  Even the parents of the two teens in love are smarter than we expect.  We're so used to parents in these movies either being clueless, being strongly against the young couple being in love, or dumber than a bag of hammers.  Here, Laura Dern gets to give an intelligent and sympathetic portrayal as Hazel's mom.  I also like that Hazel and Gus often act like real teenagers, instead of pawns in a tragic love story.  They play video games together, they egg the car of a mean girl who broke the heart of a friend, and when they're just talking about their lives or what's on their mind, the dialogue often sounds heartfelt and real.  This is not the mechanical, assembly line romance you might be expecting.

Well, for the most part, at least.  To be fair, Gus does come across as being a bit saintly and faultless at times.  At least it's not so bad that it completely destroys the realism of the character, but I did keep on waiting for him to slip up at least once or say the wrong thing, and it never happened.  Like I said before, this is the way the character was written in the book, so I can't really blame the film for being faithful.  Any wrong steps the screenplay or the narrative may take, the actors are able to rise above it with their performances.  Speaking of the performances, Willem Dafoe has two very powerful scenes as a drunken and reclusive author who starts out as Hazel's hero, and ends up being pathetic.  His character reinforces the idea that sometimes the people we build up in our minds are not who we think they are.  It's a small role, but Dafoe makes the most of his scenes, and he's wonderful.

I can't imagine any of the legions of fans of the book being disappointed with this, as the filmmakers have included just about everything the novel offered.  Even newcomers are likely to be sucked in by the strong performances.  And to those who loved the book or this movie, I even have a recommendation - Go check out a little film called 50/50.  It came out in 2011, and it didn't get a lot of attention, but it deals with a lot of the same themes this film does, and also uses humor to tackle the difficult subject of cancer.  In my personal opinion, it's an even better movie than this. 

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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