The Fault in Our Stars

The blockbuster YA novel of today has become so closely aligned with all the Hollywood clichés of the last decade: dystopian futures, chosen one teenagers, dark overtones, epic CGI battles for the fate of all mankind and one book needlessly split into two films.

“The Fault In Our Stars” by John Green is as big as they come but has been adapted into a single, trim, two-hour love story and tearjerker, and a modest one at that. Both the success of the book and the movie is that they can take big, melodramatic themes of death, disease, heartbreak and even oblivion and make them feel intimate and personal.

Green’s novel is the story of a 17-year-old cancer patient named Hazel Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) who meets 18-year-old and now cancer-free Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) at her cancer support group. He’s forward, strangely eloquent and a bit awkward, and she’s sarcastic and pessimistic with a slight frump and eye roll to send his way. Gus dubs his crush with the new identity of Hazel Grace and they soon fall in love, but she fears the damage she’ll do to both Gus and her parents when she inevitably passes away.

The screenplay by pair Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber (“500 Days of Summer”, “The Spectacular Now”) follows the source material as well as any major YA adaptation, even lifting full passages out of the book, but it’s missing the punchy, brash and flippant energy to Green’s novel.

That’s because on its face, the story to “The Fault in Our Stars” is quite simple; two cancer patients have a meet-cute, fall in love and later vacation to Amsterdam to fulfill a dying wish. The book’s lifeblood comes from its attitude.

In Director Josh Boone’s film, the book’s modesty is perfectly contained. Some of the film’s biggest turning points occur at a picnic or on a park bench without frills or swells that might amplify the melodrama. But Hazel and Gus’s wit and humor also seems to have been scaled back. It floats through moments and plot points without any of the commentary that livened the book or any of the visual details that might accentuate the story.

One of the film’s best moments involves Hazel and Gus’s visit with an author they admire (Willem Dafoe) who they have traveled all the way to Amsterdam to speak with. As he snarls at them and questions their intellect in asking juvenile questions about his novel, the close ups get abrasive and the editing gets snappy, and for once the film’s tone seems to match the energy found in Green’s pages. The author challenges how Hazel and Gus seem to interpret his story, and it almost transparently speaks to all the teen girls who inhale novels like this.

Those sort of challenging moments are missing from this otherwise compelling and emotional tearjerker. “The Fault in Our Stars” is blindly faithful to the source without capturing any of the nuance, and it checks all the YA adaptation boxes with pop songs on the soundtrack and attractive people to look at. The story may be strong and Woodley and Laura Dern as her mother may show promise on screen, but the film’s visual style relegates it to the teen soaps littering the CW.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is a story of fearing what life may hold for others around you after you die and the fear of not being able to know what becomes of them, like a story without an ending or closure. When something like “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” tout the same lines of individuality, it’s refreshing to see and read a story with a much broader outlook on life. It’s just a shame the film adaptation didn’t bring more of that insight to the screen.

3 stars