You would think disease films are the bane of critics far and wide. The casual assumption is here comes another Love Story in its umpteenth incarnation replete with maudlin sentimentality and wooden stereotype characters. This film treatment of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault In Our Stars manages to avoid much of the eye-rolling-inducing cliches present in the genre. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Spectacular Now, 500 Days Of Summer) harbor both a respect for their source material and a knack for writing interesting enough witticisms that go a long way toward defraying the emotional pain of its three central characters.
However, in a star-making turn, Shailene Woodley (The Descendants, The Spectacular Now) takes her character, Hazel, a sixteen-year-old with stage-four cancer, into a dimension that propels what would probably be no more than an average film into an entirely different proposition. Her every expression commands attention as she wheels around her ever-present oxygen tank. Basically friendless at the film’s outset, she meets an outgoing charmer at a church-based support group she attends at the urging of her mom (Laura Dern), who fears Hazel has sunk into depression. Gus (Ansel Elgort), who is high on life after his disease has gone into remission, sports an amputated leg and loads of panache. Gus and Hazel are soon exchanging late night text messages and gravitating toward each other in a big way, although they profess to bypass the boyfriend/girlfriend thing.
The Fault In Our Stars contains a third character, Isaac (Nat Wolff, the best thing about the new film Palo Alto) who seems a lot more upset that his girlfriend is dumping him than the fact that his one good eye will also go sightless after a surgery that scares her off. You don’t just need a decent screenplay to pull off the kind of flip, irreverent reactions these characters have to their plight. Actors the caliber of Woodley and Wolff need to bring it home, and it happens here nicely. Less successful is Elgort, rather one-dimensional, especially compared to Miles Teller, Woodley’s counterpart in The Spectacular Now. The Spectacular Now is the better film but The Fault In Our Stars allows Woodley to tackle a much more complex character. She is worth the price of admission and then some. Willem Dafoe, in yet another villainous role, plays an expatriate author who Hazel is bent on contacting in his hometown of Amsterdam. He’s an annoying character–both by design and by Dafoe’s overplaying him. It’s lucky the kids in the film are around to act rings around him.
3.5 Faults In Our Stereotypes (out of 5 stars)