Starring: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Laura Dern
At the age of thirteen, Hazel Lancaster (Woodley) was diagnosed with thyroid cancer which almost killed her and eventually caused her to lose half of the functioning in her lungs and make her terminally ill. Reluctantly part of a cancer support group, Hazel meets Augustus Waters (Elgort) a charismatic and adventurous cancer survivor. The two become friends and Augustus, smitten with Hazel, tries to win her affections whilst she, wary of her limited time left, tries to keep her distance.
If I had to point to any actor this year whose career has had a meteoric boost, it would be Shailene Woodley. A prolific TV actress who received adulation in Alexander Payne's movie The Descendants back in 2011, this year saw her star in Divergent, that did stellar business in the US box office and now The Fault In Our Stars which seems to have done the same. So, it's successful, but does that mean it's any good?
Well, making money in the film industry always have a degree of risk, but there are some things that stand better than others when it comes to possibly earning a profit. Few would've doubted the lucrative nature of Harry Potter as a film property, Marvel seem incapable of losing money at the box office and this film plucks at saccharine melodrama and teenage romantic fantasy in such a fashion that it could cause the skies to rain gold.
There is an audience out there, a sizeable one at that, that could lap this up very eagerly but I won't be snobbish here. It must be said that for all The Fault In Our Stars is very much fluff for teenage girls, it happens to be fluff made with some degree of skill. It goes without saying that cancer (especially terminal cancer) is a very clear way to get an emotional response to your audience. Virtually everyone knows someone who has had it and the majority of people will know someone who has died because of it. Movies about terminal cancer have proved over the years to be notorious tear-jerkers. For many, this means that The Fault In Our Stars will be a modern day version of Terms Of Endearment. The film is filled to the brim with tales of hardship as well as moments of romanticism but there is more.
There is some humour to be had and there is some joy, although I suspect some of what I found amusing may not have been intended as such (does anyone else just find something inexplicably joyful about Willem Dafoe listening to Swedish hip-hop over massive speakers?) but with all the emotion, I never felt the emotional button being pushed. More like a finger just hovering above like some sentiment-inducing sword of Damocles. A crashing force that never comes. The acting's fine and we have two talented young leads who seem to have genuine chemistry but getting a sense of their lives outside of each other is tricky. Laura Dern plays the loving mother of Woodley but we never get too much from dad, played by Sam Trammell, other than a "don't hurt my daughter" scene with Elgort that is never followed up on. We never even see Elgort's parents save for some quick glances at the end.
As the romantic duo at the film's core, The characters of Hazel and Augustus do represent two different but common kinds of adolescent. Hazel is precocious and, understandably, nihilistic. She spends her time rereading the same obscure and intellectual, if pretentious, novel. Augustus is mostly just about having fun and damning the consequences, although his declarations of love do come off as inauthentic, but look at the genre we're dealing with here. It's part of the game. This reaches its apex with a whistle-stop tour of Amsterdam which from a romantic level works in some ways (there's a chaste, but still surprisingly passionate bedroom scene) but not in others (the scene of the two kissing, and then being applauded for it, in the Anne Frank house has already proved...controversial).
In short, this film knows it has an audience clamouring for it and it knows exactly how to tackle that audience. As a tool for making money (and, to be realistic, it's called the showBUSINESS for a reason) it works very well. As far as artistic merits go, it's not perfect but in all honesty, it does work.
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