From the writers of (500) Days of Summer I expected much better in a romance film involving two
teenage cancer patients. The Fault in Our
Stars, directed by Josh Boone, is not cloying or mawkish, but it is oh so
precious – relentlessly so. It is constantly aware of how perfect a movie it’s
so desperately trying to be. I can even sort of tell from this movie that the
source novel is likely similarly insistent on its sense of perfection in its
characters and plotting.
The story is narrated by Hazel (Shailene Woodley), a
seventeen-year old with stage four cancer that has left her with a lung ailment
that demands twenty-four hour attention from an oxygen tank. Woodley is a
talented actress whom I have greatly admired and here she really holds the
movie together. Without her performance, exuding youth along with naturalism
and a realistic outlook on her situation that you wouldn’t expect from a girl
her age, the movie doesn’t work. But Marc Webb’s and Scott Neustadter’s
screenplay pushes too hard on those buttons that make Hazel seem too
intelligent, too over it, too cynical to go in for the platitudes and clichés associated
with her disease.
