Aubrey MalonePaper Towns (15A)
“Never touch your idols,” said Gustave Flaubert. “The gilding will stick to your fingers.” The epithet came to my mind as I watched this coming-of-age parable about a mild-mannered young man, Quentin (Nat Wolff, pictued above with his co-star) who falls in love with a feisty childhood neighbour, Margo (Cara Delevingne) and hopes the relationship will continue into adulthood.
It doesn’t, but one night after Margo discovers her boyfriend has been cheating on her, she sneaks into Quentin’s room and asks him to join her on a revenge mission against the cheating boyfriend. Afterwards Margot disappears. The rest of the film is taken up with him searching for her with his friends Ben (Austin Abrams), Radar (Justice Smith), Radar’s girlfriend Angela (Jaz Sinclair) and Margo’s best friend Lacey (Halston Sage).
Do we care as much about Margo as Quentin does? I, for one, didn’t. I found her to be a pampered young girl who thought rather too much of herself. Neither is she beautiful enough to justify Quentin’s adoration of her.
Lacey is actually more beautiful and should have been the love interest. That would have made the story more plausible. As things stand, Lacey is shunted into the role of a kind of comic fantasy for Ben. (His infatuation with her gives the film some of its funniest moments.)
The main point being made, we’re informed by the tagline, is that one has to lose oneself to find oneself. Fine, but haven’t we been down this road more than once before?
For a lot of the time, Paper Towns is really much ado about nothing. And Margo is too precious about her eschewing of conventional values. It may be fulfilling for an adventurous youth to drop out of college but she doesn’t replace it with much except reading books in a one-horse town. It’s not quite Pattie Hearst, is it? Or even James Dean.
Quentin feeds into such preciousness with his excessive adulation of her. The film centres on the idea of his frantic search for her being as much about process as product, as much about travel as destination. The stations along the way to the metaphorical ‘paper town’ are as important as the town itself. (A paper town is a fictional one cartographers put onto maps to deter copycats.)
To this extent, the film is more about friendship than Quentin’s search for an “ineluctable ideal”, to use the famous Joycean phrase. In such a framework, Margo is a chimera, her gingerbread clues to her whereabouts no more adult than those of Hansel & Gretel in the fairy-tale. The pity is that it takes him 108 minutes to cotton on to this.
It’s an enjoyable enough ride but the message is old hat. It’s also patronising to teen audiences in its sense of self-importance. When the aforementioned Mr Dean made Rebel Without A Cause we had some genuine adolescent alienation going on but in this bland universe where the ‘Prom’ becomes a kind of holy grail, the definition of rebellion doesn’t seem much more expansive than the joke about the Kerry thrill-seeker who eats his After Eight mints at 7.30.
Contrary to what the film seems to believe, ‘cutting class’ isn’t a grand felony – whatever about breaking into abandoned buildings in the small hours of the morning in search of something that was never really there in the first place.
*** Good