The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

*** ½ out of ****

Teen fiction is bigger today than it ever has been, and I think that's a good thing. Anything that will get young people reading instead of looking at a screen is a good thing. It's SUCH a good thing that I am not even bothered by relatively pulpy tripe like “The Maze Runner”, “Insurgent” or “Twilight”. But I will admit that that style of novel has made me pretty confident of what to expect from a movie made from them. Some of them (particularly the “Hunger Games” films) are really quite good, but nothing earth shattering or close to "great". I expected the same thing from “The Fault in Our Stars”.

I could not have been more wrong.

The readership of my movie review blog isn't large enough for this sentence to be a big risk, but it's still a bit of a limb to go out on: if this film wasn't an adaptation of a “teen novel” it would have been more than a fixture at the Teen Choice Awards - it would have received a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Some fabulous performances, including an enchanting one from Shailene Woodley, lead the way.  Add to it a heart-wrenching plot (that manages to avoid the “I was designed to make you cry” feeling many tear-jerkers have) and some really brilliant dialogue and end up what I think of as the best weeper in years.

But it isn't about loss or sadness – it's about love.

Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) hasn't had it easy. She's sixteen years old and has been suffering for years with thyroid and lung cancer that will eventually kill her. She's lasted as long as she has because of “the miracle” - a drug trial that has put her in a lengthy remission, though everyone knows it won't last forever. She deals with her fate as well as anyone her age could be expected to, and she has the corresponding teen angst and fatalist attitude to go with it. That is, until she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort).

Augustus is an eighteen year old cancer survivor. He lost his foot and part of his leg a while back to the disease, but is now cancer free and virtually unaffected thanks to his prosthetic. He first meets Hazel when attending a cancer support group with a friend of his that is suffering from ocular cancer, and the sight of her hits him like a thunderbolt. He can't take his eyes off her. Hazel likes Gus and finds him intriguing, but for Gus it's clearly love at first sight.

I'm not going to go too far into the details of their love story, as like all love stories it's just a matter of how they discover each other. But I can't say enough about some of the dialogue in the film – this is where I realized that the writer must be something considerably more than a teen-pulp author. With just a few words he makes you understand what the characters are feeling so clearly it's amazing. Lines like, “I fell in love with him the way you fall asleep – slowly... and then all at once.” Wow.

I'm sure it's no secret that (spoiler alert – stop here if you don't want to know the sad secret of the film's second half) while Hazel hesitates to enter a relationship with Gus due to her impending doom, it is Gus that suffers a remission and slides toward his death before her. And the way these two young characters deal with this fate that really floored me. Anger, courage, regret, fear.... you feel everything they feel. But it is their devotion to each other that really tweaks your heart. At one point Gus asks Hazel to write a elegy for him, and once she does he asks her to read it so he can hear what she'll say at his funeral. The scene where she reads it to him, the beauty of the words, the strength of the sentiment, an the unique description she uses to define her feelings for him..... if you don't struggle not to dissolve into a puddle of tears you have no heart at all.....

But this film is more than just a tear-jerker – it's a movie about young people and their feelings. Decades ago, films like “The Breakfast Club” (1986), “The Sure Thing” (1985) and “Pump Up The Volume” (1990) were ground-breaking because it showed that you could have youthful leads in movies that dealt with real issues, real feelings and very realistic characters. “The Fault in Our Stars” has the same impact, but framed in a setting that made their real feelings that much more potent. And eventually that much more heart-breaking.

This movie has been out for about 9 months on DVD so I assume most people that were interested in the source material have already seen it. But for any reader that has not bothered because it's “just another movie from a teen novel”, you should reconsider. The final sequence of the film was a little too “Hollywood” for my taste, which is the only reason I didn't give it four stars. It is a lovely film filled with terrific performances. You'll love it.