Directed by:
Josh BooneCinematography:
Ben RichardsonCast:
Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Willem Dafoe, Laura Dern, Nat Wolff, Lotte Verbeek, Sam Trammell, Mike Birbiglia, Maurice Nathan Weert, Emily Peachey (more)Plots(1)
Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort) share a sarcastic sense of humor, a distaste for the conventional, and ultimately a love that sweeps them on an unforgettable journey. Although the two teens face unlikely challenges, their courage and dedication to each other prove that while life isn’t perfect, love can still be extraordinary. Laura Dern and Sam Trammell also star in this powerfully moving film based on John Green’s New York Times best-selling novel. (20th Century Fox AU)
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Reviews (12)
A self-aware mix of romance and drama (a classic trend of recent years), with just the right amount of both. Too bad about the drawn-out ending, though, which may be too sentimental, but understandable considering the catharsis and the film's tone, but it never descends into awkwardness or pathos. The chemistry of the two leads is excellent, with a great Shailene Woodley, who will significantly overshadow Jennifer Lawrence in the future.
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I had heard a lot of things about this film from various sources, but I delayed watching it for a long time, as I suspected that it would push a lot of emotions, since the main themes are young people suffering from serious illnesses, so it was to be expected that there would be a grim reaper hanging around. In the end, it's a kind of bittersweet film where on the one hand you watch the characters enjoying the time they have left, while on the other hand there is the presence of impending death, which unfortunately is not a choice. I probably wouldn't watch it again, but I can still recommend this film. In short, a film that shows the fact that serious illness and death are not a matter of the older generation alone, and that it is important to enjoy every day to the fullest.
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And damn, how I was looking forward to getting that done. The posters, the trailers, the whole story (two barely-hairy people winning cancer and a heap of love), and the obligation to see this film sounded to me like the news announcing that a cacodemon has emerged from the depths of the earth and the country is in for a thousand years of agonizing tyranny. But hell isn't happening. While The Phallus in Our Stars mixes suburban teen melodrama with the gravity of terminal illness, and manages to wring just about everything out of the subject matter in a fairly merciless running time, the flip side of the film is a rather refreshing Reitman-esque comedy that thankfully allows the characters to do a lot more speaking and acting rather than letting themselves get dragged through the IV and stare at the wall in anticipation of the inevitable. The protagonists are not just tolerable, but instead likeable, intelligent, and self-deprecating. The tearful valley of the last half hour is survivable precisely because of the relationship we've made with them in the first hour and a half, where she cancer was still somehow all right and cool. Not to mention that it makes the immanent presence of death work, which in some places is pleasantly beyond the comfort zone. Faulty Stars has a lot of problematic scenes (the whole Anne Frank sequence, the eulogy, the letter ex machina) and a lot of very pleasantly atypical ones (Hazel's unsentimental father, the discussion with the writer in Amsterdam) and can be hated more or less just as easily as loved. It strikes me as ideal on a romantic level, especially as a counterpoint to Meyer's opuses, where everyone stares and sighs into the distance with a shattered soul at the curse of eternity, while here there is talk and jokes in a close encounter with the non-existence of life after death. If I were sixteen, I'd be all over this movie.
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For most of its run this film was surprisingly likeable because it wasn’t the self-serving and cheap emotional blackmail that I feared. And, even though in the end things eventually take the path of emotional blackmail, one it had skilfully crossed up that point, I still liked it. The strongest point is that both of the stars manage to play their roles in a very likeable way. I was actually looking forward to being sarcastically nasty at them, but I can’t.
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It's a shame that this film will find its place among my favorites, and yet I will probably never watch it again. Because Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort gave some of the most natural acting performances. That's why it's a shame, and why I won't be watching it again. Because if they hadn't been so great, I wouldn't be so taken with it. And I don't even have words for the story.
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