Ah yes, death. Dylan once wrote “there is no sense in trying to deal with the dying” and I agree up to a point. The only thoughts that really matter is the deepest and the deepest of those are the dying. “The Fault In Our Stars” -clumsily inverting Shakespeare’s classic line, is a teens with cancer melodrama that had me burbling like a baby from time to time, especially since I was home sick when I watched it and feeling very vulnerable.
It is a vulnerable vision of imminent mortality. An 18 year old boy Augustus (Ansel Elgort) and a 17 year old girl Hazel (Shailene Woodley ) meet at a cancer group for teens, Gus is in remission and is there with a friend who is about to have his second eye removed, and Hazel is being forced to go to please her parents who are, quite naturally, worried about their teenage daughter’s terminal illness disposition.
Hazell has thyroid cancer, almost croaled a coupla years earlier and her lungs are giving out and she carries an oxygen tank around with her. Gus is the boy of her dreams, an 18 year old virgin who reads her favorite book “An Imperial Affliction” a cancer book which ends mid sentence and they use their “Make A Wish” thingy to go to Amsterdam and meet the author who is a complete and total dick (Willem DaFoe -so what did they expect?). Then Gus’s cancer returns.
So, yeah, we know where this is going though for the most part it gets there very skilfully. The scene where the couple first kiss is at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and to my mind, is surreally tasteless whatever subtext they might be working on. Illness is not a very exact metaphor for a holocaust, though obviously the cancer numbers are far worse. The problem is, you can’t compare one with the other however much you might want to. Killing Jews is completely an made, there the fault truly is in ourselves. Based on a Young Adult novel by John Green, who co-wrote the script, and directed by Josh Boone and Season Kent, it is a death fantasy for teens and other romantics.
The acting is sublime, Shailene was so good in “The Descendents” and she is nearly as good here and Ansel Elgort is her equal. Laura Dern does a fine turn as her mother. It is sentimental movie making, which earns its tears. Though, in the end, it brings us to the same well know problems with dealing with death. It presents us with two kids and it kills em off thereby making their life more precious and if this is meant to help teenage cancer patients I don’t see how. what if you don’t have your own personal Gus or Hazel? What do you dream of then.
Still, what else can you do with early death? That infinities are both long and short, it sounds like a wise idea but how does it help? Our mortality is so imminent, what can be done for a 17 year old girl who is going to die… soon. “The Fault In Our Stars” makes you cry for these kids but you would any way, it makes the horror of cancer, something I completely understand because I lost somebody I loved very much to the dreaded disease, even worse. It is one thing to die when you’re 70, something else entirely when you’re 18.
At its best, “The Fault In Our Stars” is “Love Story”times two. It’s only really sharp idea is Hazel calling herself a grenade that when it goes off will destroy everything in her life. Aren’t we all?
Grade: B+
