In his company, she discovers there's a world beyond hospitals, medication, pain and cancer. He fears oblivion, while she believes it's inevitable. When a practical Hazel (Shailene Woodley) meets the charming and cheerful Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) at a cancer support group, sparks fly. Normal adolescent language and behavior, but not too much of it.The Fault in our stars Stays faithful to the book. “The Fault in Our Stars” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The loudest weeping you hear - including your own - may arise not from grief or admiration, but from envy.
There is something disturbing about that, and also, therefore, about the source of some of the tears the movie calls forth.
They know the meaning of their own lives, and try as it might, the movie can’t help but give cancer credit for this state of perfection. Hazel and Gus possess an absolute moral authority, an ability to assert the truth of their experience that few can share and many might covet. Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy. It’s hardly a fair fight, and the way it is rigged - fresh-faced, innocent, possibly dying young people facing off against a cynical, broken-down, alcoholic old wreck - provides a clue to the emotional logic of “The Fault in Our Stars.” It’s less a movie about cancer than a depiction - really a celebration - of adolescent narcissism. The quarrel between the novelist and his fans, the only real conflict in the film other than the one with disease, is essentially a battle between argument and feeling. And yet it is still possible, all these years later, to laugh at the stilted dialogue and awkwardly staged scenes and find yourself wet-eyed and raspy-voiced at the end. The film was potent and memorable without being all that good. A long time ago, a movie called “ Love Story,” also based on a best seller with terminal illness in its plot, swept through the popular culture and landed its female lead on the cover of Time. ? The question is not meant to be a spoiler, but rather a point of reference. With an unlighted cigarette wedged into his crooked, cocky grin, he is a perfect romantic hero, complete with a semigoofy sidekick (Nat Wolff).īut what can you say about a girl who. Gus, meanwhile, is such a handsome bundle of chivalry, positive energy and impish self-deprecation that we may swoon over him even before Hazel does. Because she never asks for our approval, we are entirely in her thrall. Woodley plays nearly every scene with a plastic oxygen tube anchored to her nostrils and splayed across her face (Hazel’s cancer affects her lungs), but her un-self-conscious performance is the perfect mirror of her character’s pragmatic temperament. She falls in love with Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), known as Gus, a fellow “cancer kid” who has lost part of his leg to the disease but who has been healthy since then and is determined to lead “an extraordinary life.” Green’s pages, frames the story - is Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager who has lived most of her life with the metastatic thyroid cancer she expects will end it very soon. The main character - whose voice-over narration, drawn verbatim from Mr.
It succeeds.īut then again, a brief survey of the story and its themes might make you wonder how it could possibly fail. Directed by Josh Boone (“Stuck in Love”) with scrupulous respect for John Green’s best-selling young-adult novel, the film sets out to make you weep - not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. “The world is not a wish-granting factory.” That line, from “The Fault in Our Stars,” is undoubtedly true, and it is also true that the movie, like the book before it, is an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears.