The Fault in Our Stars

It’s difficult to embrace a film that begins by claiming to be above the sugar-coated false promises of romance novels and Hollywood tear-jerkers, and then goes on to embody many of the most egregious clichés of those very mediums. But The Fault in Our Stars overcomes this and its other shortcomings by the strength of its lead actors. The story follows the well-worn formulas of two of Hollywood’s most durable genres: the coming-of-age comedy and the terminal disease drama. It fits squarely in the tradition of romantic tragedies like Love Story (1970), Terms of Endearment (1983), Dying Young (1991), and Sweet November (2001). In line with a general trend in contemporary popular culture, the subjects of such stories are getting more and more youthful. The characters in The Fault in Our Stars are at least four years younger than Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal were in Love Story, but they learn a great deal more about love than that it “means never having to say you’re sorry.” This film’s key sentiment, “If you want the rainbow you have to deal with the rain,” is at least an accurate statement.

The film’s source is the young adult novel of the same name by John Green that is hugely popular among teenage girls. The film seems aimed at that same demographic, which may put off some viewers of different cohorts.  Weepy melodramas about first love and early death are often dismissed by sophisticated adults as hackneyed and saccharine, but, when done well, these stories about young love, first sex, independence, responsibility, identity, and mortality provide a unique opportunity for young audiences to grapple vicariously with important issues that they will soon face in their real lives. The young girls drawn to movies like this one could not ask for a better surrogate than Shailene Woodley, the rising star who stole the screen from George Clooney in The Descendants (2011) and gave one of the most honest and captivating teenage performances of recent memory in The Spectacular Now (2013). Woodley’s Hazel Grace Lancaster is a bright, sarcastic sixteen-year-old with terminal thyroid cancer, trying to live her life and navigate herself through relationships with her parents and the cute boy she meets in a lame support group.  Hazel Grace is sharp, incisive, and pragmatic, but also warm, funny, and lovely to be around, and Woodley, by all rights, should be able to launch an impressive career from this star-making role. 

The second lead, Ansel Elgort (who played Tommy Ross in Kimberly Peirce’s ill-advised 2013 remake of Carrie) isn’t as instantly likable as Woodley. His cocky Augustus Waters seems too good to be true at first, but he wins us over gradually, at about the same speed that he wins Hazel Grace’s heart. That positive arc doesn’t hold true for the best friend played by Nat Wolff, nor, unfortunately, for the film’s supporting cast of excellent adult actors, Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, and Willem Dafoe. Their overwritten roles never allow us to see them as anything but boilerplate contrivances.

The Fault in Our Stars boasts a screenplay by the same team who adapted The Spectacular Now, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, but the writers are not able to overcome the limits of the source material. They don’t get much help from Josh Boone, who directs the picture with all the style and aesthetic grace of a Toyota commercial. The film’s over-lit, unflattering visual quality is at odds with its romantic tone, and the constant use of pop music to underscore the big emotional moments runs counter to the main character’s assertions about how things “really happen.”

In trying to assign a grade to this picture I find fault in my own system of stars. Do I rate the film on its failure to move my middle-aged self, or should I judge it on how much I would have liked the movie if I were still the age of its intended audience. I think I would have fallen hard for this film as a teenager, even though Elgort is no John Cusack. The Fault in Our Stars does not succeed in palpably recreating the intense emotional experience of adolescence in an older viewer, like Stephen Chbosky’s wonderful The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)--itself a kind of romantic, teenage, disease picture. But it is certainly superior to Love Story.