Starring: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Runtime: 125 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2014
| 
| 
What healthy teenager hasn’t dreamed of suffering from a terminal disease? You get to look pale and interesting, you’re pampered by everybody – and best of all, you have total justification for your belief that the world just doesn’t understand.
Josh Boone’s The Fault In Our Stars, based on a bestseller by John Green, takes this fantasy all the way. Shailene Woodley stars as Hazel Grace Lancaster, a hardboiled 16-year-old who’s slowly dying of lung cancer (she has oxygen tubes in her nose for the entire film, which must qualify as cinematic integrity of a sort).
Bullied by her loving but overbearing mother (Laura Dern) into attending a support group, she finds a soulmate her own age in Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a talkative show-off who hasn’t allowed losing a leg to osteosarcoma to lessen his zest for life.
Augustus is a joker, but he has a serious side: he and Hazel discuss their favourite novels, and ponder the kind of deep existential questions that preoccupy many in their age group, fatally ill or not.
There’s a pleasing straightforwardness to The Fault In Our Stars, especially in the earlier, more upbeat scenes. As romance blossoms, the film literally brightens, with swathes of the cheery primary colours you might expect to see in an actual teen cancer ward. Needless to say, Boone is softening us up for the final act, designed to tug at our heartstrings extensively, repetitively and without remorse. I felt my own heart hardening by the time of the third tear-jerking setpiece – but sniffles all round me continued to the end.
The emotional manipulation would be harder to take if not for Woodley, who has quickly and deservedly become a new “young adult” star. At the age of 22, she may not be able to retain her guileless manner for much longer but for now she’s very appealing, with her low, croaky voice and her gift for letting her expressions of shock or embarrassment melt into delight.
Elgort comes off as smirky and obnoxious by comparison, but this is partly the nature of the material: Augustus is less a credible character than a dream boy who exists to coax Hazel out of her shell. Woodley herself performed a similar function as Miles Teller’s girlfriend in The Spectacular Now – scripted by the same writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber – so I suppose you could argue turnabout is fair play.
The Fault in Our Stars works excellently as a teen love tearjerker, but good acting, a lively script, and great source material elevate it to a story about the risk of loving at any time and at any age.
Shailene Woodley, an excellent rising young actress, plays Hazel Grace. At sixteen, Hazel has spent years in and out of hospitals fighting cancer. She carries an oxygen tank with her wherever she goes.
At sixteen, Hazel is smart enough to know that her days are numbered, that she’s living on borrowed time already, and that life has been terribly, terribly unfair to her.
To her credit, Hazel wants to live out her time honestly, looking death in the face front on, and to minimize the pain of her inevitable departure for those who love her.
She attends a support group, although she sees no point in it, to help her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) feel like she is doing something, anything, to take care of herself emotionally.
There she meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort – now the next teen heartthrob), a cancer survivor who lost a leg to his disease.
The rest of the movie is their love story.
Gus is optimistic to Hazel’s realism. He is cheerful where she is stoic. He isn’t as well-read or bookishly philosophical as she is, but he senses joy and hope deep inside. He’s a good friend and a good person.
Most of all, Gus is not afraid. The death sentence hanging over Hazel’s head doesn’t matter enough to him to scare him away.
The movie succeeds beyond a teenybopper demographic because all the characters are so richly drawn. You can’t help but root for Hazel, can’t help but admire her clear-eyed perspective and yet see how it holds her back. You can’t help but love Gus, smile at his energy, shake your head at his persistence, weep when he falters.
Dern and Trammell breathe life into the role of parents, the common awkwardness of having a teenager heightened and also diminished by their desperate fear of losing her. Even secondary characters are living, breathing people: Teen friend Isaac (Nat Wolff) who loses his eyes to cancer; the religious man who leads the support group and who almost, but not quite a caricature.; even Hazel’s hero, an author named Van Houton (Willem Dafoe) has depth and nuance to his despair.
The love is also richly drawn. The two get to know each other slowly, have moments of ups and downs, grow in understanding and trust and affection for each other before they move into a romantic relationship. The viewer can see why she loves him and why he loves her.
The Fault in Our Stars has moments of dark humor, but it is a deeply serious movie. It’s the type of movie that has a key romantic moment not in a park or field of flowers, but Holocaust memorial site. The lovers never forget death hovers over them and the audience is not allowed to forget it either.
It’s also desperately sad, deeply deeply sad. It’s hard for even the most stoic viewer to keep a dry eye. I suspect there will be one or two moviegoers in every theater who will sob uncontrollably, as a few did in the screening I attended. This is a story of loss, of life that is not fair, of a fate everyone would give anything to avoid, but are ultimately powerless to ward off.
But it is not merely that.
As Hazel and Gus dare to love each other with the future so uncertain, the story broadens. Their courage as teenagers echoes the courage we all face when we dare to truly love someone. We’re all under the threat of death, whether it comes at 18 or 88. There is loss coming for each of us who dares to love.
The beauty and truth of Hazel and Gus’s story is that it’s worth it. Love is worth it.
That is a message we need now more than ever. I believe our young people give up on marriage and drift from one romance to the next not because they are too passionate, but because they don’t believe in love enough.
As one character says in the movie, it’s a privilege to love, to truly love, someone.
12 Random Films…
