|
The Fault in Our Stars
| Released |
19 June 2014 |
| Director |
Josh Boone |
Starring
|
Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, Willem Dafoe, Lotte Verbeek |
Writer(s)
|
Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber |
| Producer(s) |
Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
126 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama, romance |
| Rating |
12A |
|
|
May induce nausea.
If you want to get rich you’d be better off putting down that Lotto ticket, picking up a pen and knocking out a young adult novel. It doesn’t even have to be good. As long as it has a healthy dose of soul searching and a dash of doomed love, the teens will lap it up. This is the only explanation I can see for the popularity of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a modern day Love Story where attractive teenagers cope heroically with text speak and life-threatening illnesses.
The teens in question are Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus (Ansel Elgort). Their meet cute is unusual in that it happens at a support group for young people with serious illnesses - Hazel has cancer which affects her lungs, while Augustus is an amputee in remission. The pair hit it off, although Hazel is reluctant to get too close to Augustus. Love and tragedy ensue.
I can forgive the fact that the young, healthy and beautiful cast never look anything other than young, healthy and beautiful. Woodley, like Ali McGraw in Love Story, has a luminous glow as if she is being lit from within and the only signal of her apparently fatal illness is a breathing tube and the occasional wheeze. This is fair enough - The Fault in Our Stars is a teen romance, not an investigation of mortality and let’s face it, nobody wants to see their favourite screen idol losing control of their bowels. Less forgivable is the fact that Hazel and Augustus are both toe-curlingly irritating.
Hazel is the more palatable of the two - sure, she’s hopelessly wet and pleased with herself in that well-read teenage way but she is nowhere near as awful as her boyfriend. Augustus is less a person than a collection of annoying affectations. The minute he explained his habit of holding an unlit cigarette between his teeth (it’s a metaphor apparently) any empathy I may have had for him evaporated in a cloud of metaphorical smoke. Obviously this was not the case for the rest of the audience, as the last half hour of the film was obscured by a chorus of sobs and sniffles.
We can conclude from this that The Fault in Our Stars seems to work for its target audience of teenage girls who have already built up a relationship with Hazel and Augustus through the novel. Looking in from the outside of this circle, I found it all excruciating and couldn’t wait for one or the other (or even both!) of the lead couple to croak it.
-
Linda O’Brien |
