Paper Towns

I did not buy the premise of Paper Towns for a second, but oddly enough, I didn't care.  The movie is oddly engaging, despite its implausible storyline, and the fact that the only reason why the kids in this movie get away with what they do is because their parents are hardly ever around.  The movie has the light, somewhat comedic feel of a John Hughes teen drama.  The kids in the movie may not be fully realistic, but there is enough honesty to the characters that we do eventually get behind them.

Our lead character and narrator of this coming of age story is Quentin (Nat Wolff), a high school senior who is pretty much defined by his conformity.  He gets straight A's, never gets in trouble, and has never really taken a risk in his life.  His main goals in life at age 18 is to go to med school, graduate, get married, and have two kids by the time he's 30.  Quintin lives across the street from Margo (Cara Delevigne), a popular girl at school whom he has secretly obsessed over since she moved into her current home.  They were friends as kids, and went on a variety of adventures around the neighborhood, but they drifted apart over time.  Margo is a free spirit, prone to disappearing from school or her home at random moments in order to find some kind of amazing adventure.  She's pretty much the kind of girl you meet only in your dreams, or the movies.

Margo comes back into Quentin's life when she climbs through his bedroom window one night, and asks him to come with her to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend, as well as some of her best friends whom she feels have wronged her.  The two seem to reconnect during their night together of pulling elaborate pranks, but when Quentin wakes up the next morning, he learns that Margo has disappeared once again without telling anyone where she has gone.  But then, Quentin begins to realize that Margo has left a series of clues that he thinks he is supposed to follow in order to find her.  The clues are quite cryptic, so this naturally means that Quentin and his two best friends from school can solve them in a matter of seconds, or stumble upon the answer almost immediately nearby.  The search for Margo will force Quentin to get out of his "comfort zone", search spooky abandoned buildings for clues, cut school, and go on a road trip to New York State.

I'll say it again, watching Paper Towns requires a certain suspension of disbelief.  The movie is based on a novel by John Green, who also wrote the book that inspired last year's effective teen tearjerker, The Fault in Our Stars.  That movie was a bit more grounded and dramatically effective.  This is more of a teenage flight of fancy mixed with a coming of age story.  There are a lot of moments where the audience will just have to throw logic out the window in order to buy the premise, such as why do we hardly ever see the parents of these kids, and why would their parents just let them leave on a thousand mile road trip at a moment's notice without warning?  What grounds these kids in some kind of reality is that they are intelligent, and talk about things smart teenagers would talk about.  When Quentin hangs out with his two best friends, Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith), they have conversations that you might overhear smart kids sharing with each other.  The dialogue does not sound scripted, and it does not sound like something out of a sitcom.

That's because just like The Fault in Our Stars, the script for this movie was provided by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who are quickly shaping up to be the go-to team for smart teen films about love. (They wrote The Spectacular Now, as well as (500) Days of Summer.) Again, they show a real honesty with the way they have young people talk, and they have the characters talk about interesting things, such as Walt Whitman and the music of Woody Guthrie.  Even the humor in the movie has a ring of truth to it.  When Quentin, Ben and Radar must psyche themselves up in order to enter a scary abandoned building, the guys decide to sing a song in order to work up their courage.  What song do they choose to sing?  The Pokemon theme song, of course.  This makes sense.  It's a song tied into something from their childhood that they shared together, and puts them in a good mood.  It's a nice touch that we don't usually see in youth movies, who usually portray their characters as being sex-driven, or as shallow as a brick.

All of the main characters are written very well here, from Quentin and his friends, right down to Margo's former best friend, Lacey (Halston Sage), who starts the movie off as an unobtainable beauty, but winds up having more to her character before the film is over.  It's the intelligence of these characters that kept me involved, no matter how stupid the plot got at times.  I mean, if a couple of kids broke into your house, vandalized it, and shaved off one of your son's eyebrows in his sleep in an act of revenge, would you not call the police?  And are parents really so totally okay with letting their kids cut school, and drive cross country from Orlando to New York State on a whim?  Yes, I was asking these kind of questions the entire time I was watching the film, but I got wrapped up enough in the characters and dialogue that I was still willing to give the film a pass.

As long as you don't think about the plot of Paper Towns too much, this can be an emotionally rewarding movie with good performances.  It harkens back to the films of John Hughes, where the kids were allowed to be smart, and be funny and honest.  Sure, the kids in Hughes' movies did impossible things too, sometimes. (Just how did Ferris Bueller fit everything he did into one afternoon?) But just like those films, this one understands that if the characters are interesting and work, we can suspend disbelief just as long as we get to spend time with them.

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

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