Aubrey MaloneThe Fault in Our Stars (12A)
It’s not always a good idea to meet your idols, as they say: the gilt has a habit of rubbing off on your fingers.
This is the experience of 18-year-old cancer victim Hazel (Shailene Woodley) after she has an underwhelming rendezvous with Peter van Houten (Willem Dafoe), the ill-mannered author of her favourite book, in Amsterdam.
She goes there with fellow cancer sufferer Augustus (Ansel Elgort), whom she meets at a support group suggested by her bubbly mother (Laura Dern). Sheís carrying an oxygen tank while he has a prosthetic leg. It’s not, you will have gathered by now, your average teen romance.
While on a later visit to the attic where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II, Hazel realises she’s developing feelings for Gus. “I fell in love the way you fall asleep,” she tells us in one of the film’s potentially cloying voiceovers, “suddenly and then all at once.”
At times their surprisingly upbeat puppy-love is cheesy, and so are some of their quasi-existential ruminations on the here-and-now versus the hereafter – or its absence. But those of you who were touched by the great courage shown by Donal Walsh in the face of his imminent death in real life in recent months will probably find enough genuine emotion to sustain you in the film's more profound moments when it zones in on genuine emotions rather than trying to milk them for crocodile tears.
Woodley is impressive almost without trying in the central role, her bittersweet Mona Lisa smile lighting up the screen just as it does the heart of her at times too Romeo-like (and at times too unrealistically upbeat) paramour.
The last time I remember such a beautiful actress stricken by a terminal disease was in Love Story. There the joke was that Ali MacGraw became more stunning each day she became closer to death.
The present film doesn’t tug at our heart-strings quite so blatantly but I found some of the scenes steered dangerously close to emotionalism, a fact that tended to mitigate against my empathy with the increasingly disarming plight of the characters.
It’s possible to make a film about terminal illness that isn’t either dismal in an Ingmar Bergman way or fluffy in a Walt Disney one. The Fault in our Stars uneasily straddles this divide, its star-crossed lovers occasionally enwreathing us within their empathetic bubble as they seize the day and rage against the dying of the light, but they’re also capable of being irritating with their self-important (and, contrarily, self-sacrificial) trajectories through life, love and the tragic cessation of both.
*** Good