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| The Fault in Our Stars: 'The swoony, drop-dead hit of the summer' – first-look review | The Fault in Our Stars: 'The swoony, drop-dead hit of the summer' – first-look review |
| (2 months later) | |
| Oh, to be a teenager in love, suffering from stage four cancer! Adapted from John Green’s bestselling YA novel, about love-struck cancer teens — a piece of doomed-love romanticism served up with bright-eyed, almost evangelical zeal — The Fault in Our Stars is dubious in the extreme, and morally and ethically objectionable from just about every angle. It elevates cancer sufferers to the same exalted state of higher being to which tuberculosis sufferers were once hoisted by Keats and Byron, or vampires by Kristen Stewart fans. It’s Twilight on chemo. It’s a few inches shy of launching a fully-fledged romantic death cult. It’s the swoony, drop-dead hit of the summer. You’ll love it. | Oh, to be a teenager in love, suffering from stage four cancer! Adapted from John Green’s bestselling YA novel, about love-struck cancer teens — a piece of doomed-love romanticism served up with bright-eyed, almost evangelical zeal — The Fault in Our Stars is dubious in the extreme, and morally and ethically objectionable from just about every angle. It elevates cancer sufferers to the same exalted state of higher being to which tuberculosis sufferers were once hoisted by Keats and Byron, or vampires by Kristen Stewart fans. It’s Twilight on chemo. It’s a few inches shy of launching a fully-fledged romantic death cult. It’s the swoony, drop-dead hit of the summer. You’ll love it. |
| The cast list divides neatly in two: those with cancer and those poor souls without it. In the plus column is Hazel (Shailene Woodley), a 17-year-old high school kid with bangs she tucks behind her ears, and a small cylinder she carries around everywhere, supplying oxygen to her lungs through a tube into her nose. “How are you doing?” asks her mom one morning. “You mean besides the terminal cancer?” replies Hazel, who, having survived a brush with the disease at age 13, has long since availed herself of the degree-zero humor of its survivors. She calls herself “the Keith Richards of cancer kids”, which makes it sound like the ultimate high school clique, second only to emo kids, goths, or Bieber haters. | |
| The movie is up to its armpits in the weird, inverted glamour of the sick. Nudged by her mother, Hazel attends a support group, headed by a bearded Jesus freak, filled with fellow cancer kids, and in her spare time reads books like The Imperial Affliction by cult Dutch author Peter Van Houten. “What's it about?” asks a handsome kid named Augustus (Ansel Elgort) with sleepy blue eyes whom she meets in group. Three guesses. “Cancer,” replies Hazel, quickly adding, “but really it’s the best book about dying written by someone who gets it but who isn’t themselves dying.” | |
| Augustus gets it. Having lost a foot to the disease, he now trails unlit cigarette from lip, as away of daring fate to interrupt his determination to live an “extraordinary life”. He wears the mysterious, unalterable smirk of someone famous and adored in another universe, who is just waiting for this one to catch up. Elgort played Woodley’s brother in Divergent, but here seems much more personally and professionally fulfilled to be playing an out-and-out dreamboat: a self-confessed virgin, Gus texts when he should, boasts killer abs and gets up immediately from his video game when Hazel enters the room — by common agreement, the modern definition of gallantry. Hazel can’t take her eyes off him, as if incredulous at his all-round gloriousness, and he agrees to be drunk in, in a spirit of magnanimity as much as anything else. | |
| The film works on only one level, but so completely on that level that the rest doesn’t seem to matter: Woodley and Elgort have terrific chemistry. There will doubtless be cynics who fail to take Gus at his own estimation – “I'm really kind of an awesome guy”– on the grounds that he isn't really any kind of guy at all, more a gleaming, golden incarnation of the filmmakers’ desire to pave every step of Hazel’s way (and by extension that of her audience) with fluttering wish fulfilment. | The film works on only one level, but so completely on that level that the rest doesn’t seem to matter: Woodley and Elgort have terrific chemistry. There will doubtless be cynics who fail to take Gus at his own estimation – “I'm really kind of an awesome guy”– on the grounds that he isn't really any kind of guy at all, more a gleaming, golden incarnation of the filmmakers’ desire to pave every step of Hazel’s way (and by extension that of her audience) with fluttering wish fulfilment. |
| Point taken. “The world is not a wish-granting factory,” says Gus, unlike the movie, which is a wish-granting machine. It’s all soft touches, like being covered in kisses. I’ve never heard so many sounds of "aw!" from an audience. Tracking down Van Houten via email, Gus elicits an invitation to visit and lays on an all-expenses paid trip to Amsterdam, where he takes Hazel to a champagne dinner, declares his love for her and, the next day, takes her to see her hero. Van Houten turns our to be not only scowling and drunk, but played by Willem Dafoe, which is a bit like coming across Max Schrek grinning at you, fangs and all, at the centre of a bunch of roses. | |
| Dafoe gives a snarling little speech on infinity, fictionality and the limits of adult pity —the only serious misstep of the film, popping its mood with a burst of vinegar. They end up in Anne Frank’s house, of all places, where Hazel pants up the stairs with her oxygen cylinder to the sound of tour-guide narration (“Where there is hope there is life”), reaches the top, kisses Gus and receive a round of applause for her labors. You won't know where to put yourself. The whole episode feels almost drunk, it's so bad, but then it seems to be the curse of these YA adaptations, that the very in-built audience that guarantees a studio green light also seems to guarantee a timorous fidelity to every comma. | |
| Otherwise, screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber — who wrote 500 Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now — do a good job of hewing to just enough realism, and intelligence, as is needed to allow the fantasy to slip down. “OK, lungs, keep your shit together,” Hazel tells herself, before embarking on that Amsterdam date. And “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once,” is simply a great movie line, whichever way you cut it. | |
| This is probably the role that will seal it for Woodley, who, since first drawing praise in Alexander Payne's The Descendants, has proven a shy performer – helpless in the face of a direct compliment, those eyes wide like a deer, her lines readings always diminishing in volume, as if she’s fading right in front of you. She spent much of Divergent looking as if she wanted the ground to open up beneath her feet and swallow her. That’s perfect, of course, for Hazel –who is fading out for good – although she throws in a little J-Law sass for good measure. | |
| The film begins and ends with a close-up of those big brown eyes and, really, on some level, there’s nobody in it but her. The whole thing is an extremely sophisticated version of that solipsistic teenage fantasy where you imagine yourself dead so you can hear what is said at your own funeral. Here we get two eulogies, read while their subjects are still alive, during which I heard something I’ve never heard from an audience: first a collective snuffle, with maybe the odd honk, as people wept openly into their drinks, followed by laughter, as we all heard ourselves and realised our own foolishness for falling for such crud. | The film begins and ends with a close-up of those big brown eyes and, really, on some level, there’s nobody in it but her. The whole thing is an extremely sophisticated version of that solipsistic teenage fantasy where you imagine yourself dead so you can hear what is said at your own funeral. Here we get two eulogies, read while their subjects are still alive, during which I heard something I’ve never heard from an audience: first a collective snuffle, with maybe the odd honk, as people wept openly into their drinks, followed by laughter, as we all heard ourselves and realised our own foolishness for falling for such crud. |
| Make no mistake: the film is crud, but the higher kind of crud that leaves you feeling OK with yourself in the morning. It opens the valves and cleans the pipes. I went in sure I would hate it and emerged, two hours later, pale-faced and tear-stained, marveling at the scale and speed of my wipeout. “There was a lot of crying in that theater,” I heard one young man report into his cell phone, in the hushed tone you might reserve for a massacre. “Man, that was ugly.” | |
| The Fault in Our Stars is out in the US on 6 June and in the UK on 20 June | The Fault in Our Stars is out in the US on 6 June and in the UK on 20 June |