The more beloved the book, the scarier it is to attempt a film adaptation. Perhaps the only way, for dedicated readers and lovers of cinema to reconcile themselves to this now inevitable trajectory is to both read the book and see the film keeping in mind that, yes, while the individual imagination will inevitably trump the cinematic version, the book and the film are two very different forms and must therefore not be measured, pardon the pun, via the same lens.
The Fault in Our Stars is a beloved “young adults” novel written by John Green. Optioned by 20th Century Fox, the film version started shooting in 2013 and was just released to great acclaim and astonishing success – it has made $238 million to date, that with the modest budget of $12 million.
Thankfully, The Fault in Our Stars although unabashedly a love story, is more The Hunger Games than Twilight.
Shailene Woodley, a very talented and immensely likeable young woman plays the smart, witty Hazel Grace Lancaster – a teenager possibly dying of cancer. As often happens in romantic comedies, our lovely heroine meets a charming young man named Augustus Waters (Ansel Algert). Augustus (or Gus) is also a cancer survivor; the two meet at an infuriatingly banal cancer help group, and so begins a story that will break even the hardest of hearts.
There is a reason to send your teenagers to watch this film (if the girls haven’t already sped into the theater armed with boxes of tissues, ready for catharsis). All too rarely are there good films that deal intelligently with teenage.
For those of us who survived those angst ridden years relatively unscathed, we are grateful to see a normalised version of good decent kids who don’t run around being mean to each other and talking in some sort of horrifying teenage speak. Apparently not all teenagers type texts with unspeakable abbreviations,some even have grasp on punctuation (after all one must learn how to spell when one reaches college).
But to stop being flippant for a moment, this film is rather more than just “good” mainly because it deals with the real substance of being that young. Most young people this age feel immortal; teenage is all about thinking that one is an adult, being omniscient, and living forever.
Rarely has a mainstream film dealt with that kind of material with such delicacy. It also very possible that the film only really attains such depths due to the talent of Shailene Woodley– a young actress with a brain and an enormous heart.
Watch trailer: