The Fault in Our Stars

So I saw The Fault in Our Stars finally. I’ve read a handful of John Green’s novels now and I’ve got to admit that TFIOS was my least favorite of the three. This could be because I don’t need high emotion in order to find a book brilliant, and often times allowing untimely death to be the main plot point in a story smacks of writerly manipulation. For at least the third time on this blog let me state that Nicholas Sparks can bite my big toe. And I am so sick of rabid TFIOS fans crying that this isn’t a book about cancer. Could you please have the cojones to own that this is a book about cancer? Few people would give a crap about this love story if they weren’t dying.

That being said, it is a lovely story. I went into the theater pretty cynical. Then about halfway through the film when Augustus Waters is working his magic on both Hazel and me, I remembered how it was going to end. “Oh crap. This movie is going to rip me apart, isn’t it?” Then future me handed me a tissue and said while sniffling, “Uh huh.”

If you are unfamiliar with The Fault in Our Stars let me briefly enlighten you: Hazel Grace is our protagonist. She has terminal lung cancer and has to cart around an oxygen tank so she can breathe. She meets Augustus Waters at a cancer support group where he was present as moral support for a friend. He had cancer years earlier and lost a leg to it, but he is now without any signs of cancer. He befriends Hazel and falls in love with her against her will because as she so aptly puts it “I am a grenade. And I’m going to go off and destroy everyone around me. I’m just trying to minimize the casualties.” The plot is very Young Adulty and cancery, but what does make John Green’s stuff stand out and what is making all those fans so rabid is the ideas that are going on in between. Hazel and Augustus discuss oblivion and the meaning of life and love and are trying to work out the deep lessons of living that most people don’t begin to understand until old age – but they don’t have that long to figure it out. And I remember what I appreciated most in the novel was that yes, they are normal teenagers and no, they are not selfish, shallow, or rude. Hazel’s main concern is what will happen to her parents after she dies because she has the maturity to state “the only thing worse than biting it to cancer when you’re sixteen is having a kid bite it to cancer at sixteen.” I love that she doesn’t wallow so deeply in how hard this is for her that she is insensitive to how hard it is for those around her. And for that I am grateful to John Green for raising the caliber of the teens found on the pages of Young Adult literature.

As always, I am in love with Shailene Woodley and I continue to believe that she takes a good script and makes it wonderful. In this case she took a book that I felt kind of “eh” about and actually made me cry. Augustus, (weirdly played by the same boy who is her character’s brother in Divergent), is not super attractive which worked for me; it made him more charming. He’s more philosophical and enthusiastic teddy bear than shining knight. It allowed for his personality rather than his dashing good looks to transform him into the white knight.

The film stays very true to the novel – because the fans would have their heads if it didn’t. And even though I cried through the last 30 minutes of the movie, I didn’t leave the theater depressed. On the contrary, I felt uplifted. It is tragic and beautiful, but it is first disarming. My cynicism wasn’t going to allow me to feel much, but the humor and realism gently removed it so that I could recognize the beauty.