They’re young. They’re in love. They have cancer. She meets
him in a support group for kids with terminal illnesses. She needs an oxygen
tank to breathe. He has an artificial leg. They’re in remission, but for God
only knows how long. She’s only alive because of an experimental treatment. No
one knows if and when it’ll stop working. He’s only alive because he gave up
part of his leg. They hit it off right away. Their chemistry is immediate,
obvious, and overwhelming. They feel comfortable together. Maybe it’s because
for them love means never having to say you have cancer.
That’s the basic premise of The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance wrapped tightly around a
disease-of-the-week weepy. What makes it work is the strength of the
performances, which are clear-eyed and emphatic, and the writing, which is
sappy and sentimental, but never loses a sense of humor and perspective. This
isn’t a blinkered story of doomed true love. It’s a story about two sick kids
who make a connection in what just might be their final days. Rather than
letting this possibility weigh the film down, it’s simply accepted as a
reality. They’ve been living with their diagnoses for years now. They’re used
to it.
The girl, Hazel, is our entry point into the story. Played
by Shailene Woodley, she’s a bookish, contemplative girl who appreciates the
time she’s given, while wondering why she can’t have the freedom to be a little
more of a normal teen. She certainly doesn’t want to go to the support group in
the bottom of a church basement, where the sweet man with testicular cancer
(Mike Birbiglia) makes everyone listen to his acoustic guitar playing. She goes
anyway, and meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort). They can’t keep their eyes off of
each other. Afterwards, they hang out. Soon, they text back and forth.
It’s a typical modern teen flirtation sliding easily into romance. If it
weren’t for the cancer, it’d almost not be worth telling. The disease gives
their flirtation underlying, unspoken, urgency.
Woodley and Elgort’s performances are appealing and
comfortable. Woodley makes even the corniest narration sound like nothing more
than what a reasonably intelligent teenager might be thinking. She has an open
face and wet eyes that communicate a sadness and wonder, convincing as a person
who has been sick since she was a child, and is tentatively forging a new
relationship despite her worry about hurting one more person with her death.
Elgort’s hugely charming, playing the type of cocky that can only be
compensating for fear. And yet he seems totally at ease. He has to be the
dreamiest, most Tiger Beat-ready
cancer patient I’ve ever seen, confident and glowing with a love of life. They
look good together, banter well, and are easy to root for.
The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors as
parents and fellow support group members. Laura Dern is especially good in a role
of maternal warmth and care as a woman for whom caring for a terminal child has
become second nature. She has a devastating flashback scene, weeping while
trying to comfort her hospitalized daughter, that’s so good it’s repeated
twice. Nat Wolff, who between this and Palo
Alto is cornering the market on troubled-best-friend teen roles, plays a
kid with cancer of the eyes, nervously awaiting surgery that’ll leave him
blind. That he’s good comedic relief should tell you something about the
movie’s approach. It’s not morose or death-obsessed. It’s about people living
their lives one day at a time complete with tiny triumphs, interesting
anecdotes, sad setbacks, and funny jokes.
There’s nothing visually interesting about the movie. It’s
simply lit and full of medium and close-up two shots, what we’d more easily
call TV-like before TV went and got a smidge more cinematic at its upper edge.
Director Josh Boone gets fine performances out of his cast and keeps the style
merely functional, stepping out of the material’s way. It’s based on a popular
novel by John Green, who wrote a well-oiled melodrama machine. I mean that in a
good way. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (of (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now) retain its most
appealing elements, faithfully flavoring a low-key and sympathetic story about
families living with a sick child with fantasy romance elements. The main
characters have an idealized perfect teen love that’s all the more intense for
the cold reality of cancer potentially growing within them.
The movie has a brisk pace, humanizing detail, and a
good-humored snap to the dialogue. It hits metaphors a little too hard – a
scene drawing a parallel to Anne Frank is misjudged – but, in its simple scenes
of characters interacting, it is often deeply felt. It’s gooey, sappy at times,
intent on wringing a tear or two out of the audience. But it’s warm, appealing,
and never loses sight of the characters, balancing their youthful vitality and
the deadly stakes of their conditions. Most importantly, they’re rarely reduced
to their types. They’re presented as people who laugh, dream, plan, hope, think,
and love. They try not to let their disease define them. That the movie doesn’t
either is to its credit. And that’s what makes this glossy, bright,
manipulative Hollywood drama an engaging entertainment that can hit authentic,
tearful notes.
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