Shailene Woodley faultless as dying Hazel as Fault in Our Stars delivers warmth, wit and tears
THE Fault in Our Stars: Shailene Woodley gives a pitch-perfect lead performance in a movie that hits the tear ducts of its target audience like a weep-seeking missile.
Leigh Paatsch
Don't miss out on the headlines from Leigh Paatsch. Followed categories will be added to My News.
BASED on the young adult novel phenom by John Green, The Fault in Our Stars hits the tear ducts of its target audience like a weep-seeking missile.
However, those who know of the heavy misery that awaits in this movie will also be across the incongruous lightness of touch at work elsewhere in this sincerely affecting affair.
What to watch: All the latest movie reviews from Leigh Paatsch
While this teen romance is indeed doomed from the outset — so it goes when your Romeo and Juliet are cancer-crossed lovers — it also prepares its audience for the fall to come with surprising warmth, wit and positivity.
The winning combo of the shamelessly melodramatic and the slyly mischievous that powers The Fault in Our Stars begins and ends with yet another pitch-perfect lead performance from Shailene Woodley.
Having already proven she can steadily increase the value of seemingly average movies — just check out the recent Divergent if you have any doubts — Woodley applies her considerable talents to The Fault in Our Stars with sparkling results.
She plays Hazel, a 17-year-old woman long diagnosed with stage four thyroid and lung cancer. It is not a matter of if the disease will claim her. Just a cold, hard case of when.
While Hazel is fully aware that time is running out, she’s also acutely in tune with what time it is.
Therefore Hazel invariably has a wisecrack at the ready. Sometimes as a defence mechanism for dealing with the pity of others that is always nearby. At other times to black out that spectre of death always on the near horizon.
After some considerable deliberation — and enduring some insufferably smiley support-group therapy sessions to please her worried parents — Hazel drops her guard and permits herself a boyfriend.
His name is Augustus (Ansel Elgort), and as a recently confirmed cancer survivor, he understands a little bit about what Hazel is going through.
But not all of it. If Augustus is really going to get to know the real Hazel — the confident, insecure, selfless and serenely self-aware Hazel — then he is going to have to truly earn the privilege.
Some viewers (especially those unfamiliar with the book) are bound to have difficulties warming to the character of Augustus. Elgort’s semi-smug line delivery can be quite jarring in the film’s more serious moments.
Again, Woodley is consistently there to pick up any perceived slack. She is the reason why it is almost impossible not to become invested in how Hazel and Augustus are travelling as a couple throughout the film.
A subplot involving Willem Dafoe playing a famous author based in another country could be another sticking point for uncommitted onlookers.
Nevertheless, what The Fault in Our Stars does well as an engaging and emotionally intense roller-coaster ride, it does very well indeed.
The Fault in Our Stars (M)
Director: Josh Boone (A Place for Me)
Starring: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Willem Dafoe, Laura Dern, Nat Wolff
Verdict: Three-and-a-half stars. Live and let cry
Originally published as Shailene Woodley faultless as dying Hazel as Fault in Our Stars delivers warmth, wit and tears
Companion’s a terrifically twisting thriller best seen spoiler-free
Companion is the kind of original and inventive thriller that comes around all too rarely – but the top-level twists hit hardest by going in spoiler-free, writes Leigh Paatsch.
Why A Complete Unknown is one of the past decade’s best biopics
Any doubts about Timothee Chalamet being one of the best actors of his generation should be laid to rest after his astonishing performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.