The Fault in Our Stars really got to me, and not just because it made me cry like the 14 year old girl I used to be. On the contrary, I tend to have an emotional resistance to films that are designed to make the audience melt into a giant puddle. It’s a conundrum, because films are supposed to be emotionally and even intellectually manipulative, that’s the function of art, to change the way we feel and see the world. So it’s not that I mind being skillfully manipulated, I just abhor the cheap tricks films use to make the viewer cry. If you’re going to mess with my mind, I’d much prefer you seduce me into temporary euphoria. So why did I like this movie?
Unlike the typical tearjerker, The Fault in Our Stars, based on the eponymous Young Adult novel by John Green, does not rise up on a crescendo of hope and happiness only to drop the piano on your unsuspecting heart five minutes before the end (yes, just mention Pay It Forward to me and you will win a free rant). The situation is about as grim as can be at the outset: 16 year old Hazel Grace Lancaster has had thyroid cancer since the age of 13. She’s still hanging in there, thanks to an experimental treatment, but there is no hope of a miracle cure, and the oxygen tank she carries around would not be anyone’s accessory of choice. Hazel is depressed. Well, who wouldn’t be? The film begins with Hazel’s declaration that there is a “choice about how you tell sad stories…you can sugar-coat it the way they do in movies,” or you can tell the truth. “This is the truth,” she says, “sorry.”
The Fault in Our Stars does bring us closer to a certain truth: the lives of teenagers with cancer, and their families. It takes a look at the everyday, non-dramatic moments, and the ways in which lives and relationships are skewed by the disease, its attending pain and uncertainty. Shailene Woodley make us feel that Hazel is an ordinary girl suddenly, and almost literally, sidelined by disease. She is set apart by all the things she cannot do, and perhaps even more so, by the things she cannot hope for or dream. Her diagnosis has cheated her of the one gift that all young people have: the future. Her way of dealing is to live on that narrow margin, looking at the rest of life from a distance, and refusing the consolation of false hopes. It’s not much of a life, but it has a certain honesty. Woodley’s slightly gravelly voice strikes just the right tone for Hazel, and when she sits alone in a cafe, the book in her hand neglected as she watches a couple embrace, she makes it easy to feel for her and see the world from her perspective.
But it is not the reality of this film that made me melt, it’s the fantasy. The devastatingly handsome and unconventional Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) comes into Hazel’s life, and transforms the film into the ultimate romantic fantasy. Suddenly, someone thinks she is beautiful, and she feels beautiful because he sees her that way. The film delivers the fantasy – the thrill of finding someone who really sees you, really cares about what you think and how you feel, someone who will listen to that song you like or read that book you love and really get it. It’s love, first love, in all its hesitation, innocence and joy. Not that the film does not have its flaws, it does. But watching Hazel and Gus fall in love swept me away into the blissful state of temporary euphoria, and for me, that makes a good summer movie.
The Fault in Our Stars (USA, 126 min, 2014, English with Hebrew subtitles)
Director: John Boone; based on the eponymous novel by John Green; Screenplay: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber; Cinematography: Ben Richardson; Editing: Robb Sullivan; Music: Mike Mogis, Nate Walcott; Cast: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, Willem Dafoe.
