Being trapped in an airplane will eventually lead you to do strange fucking things. After six hours of flight with no end in sight, you'd do just about anything to kill some time, like using the plane's built-in wifi to read about the Islamic Sate or watch Hollywood's latest tear-jerker just to test your level of middle aged insensitivity. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS wreaked some havoc on social media after its release, making several people cry unexpectedly, and a lot. Several hours away from Canada still, what else was I going to do but will myself into watching the latest bundle of teeny bopper tears. No, I didn't cry and it's not because I'm an insensitive fuck. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS is just not that original. It's got a particularly cruel twist, but it's written in the sky in giant, puffy balloon letters.
Hazel (Shailene Woodley) has stage 4 cancer, which means she's slowly dying, She's been on the way down since she was 13 years old and she spends her time at home, reading the same convoluted novel about death over and over again and waiting for something to happen. After her parents force her to attend a support group, she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) a young, whopping and charismatic young man who takes interest in her. Hazel and Gus desperately fall in love with one another, while trying to fend off the ghastly demons of sickness and death lurching over their shoulders. Because it's always worth it to invest yourself if you find the one, no matter how much time you have left.
All right, I didn't cry during my viewing of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS because I kind of figured it out after 15 minutes or so. I had one of my ''wouldn't it be ridiculously cruel if...'' moments and it's exactly what the movie turned out to be. The narrative is a little claustrophobic and heavy handed, with so little characters there actually are a limited amount of things that can happen. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS is basically about a teenager (Hazel) dealing with her increasing vulnerability and her looming death and the screenplay slowly and painfully goes through every stages of half-life, including an awkward sex scene that almost aborts due to respiratory distress and a eulogy party.
Dude...can't breathe. Let me get this thing. One moment.
I gotta vent about something. Whoever is taking care of Shailene Woodley's career should be fired right now. She is turning herself into a low-rent version of Jennifer Lawrence a little more with every movie she makes. First with DIVERGENT, a ridiculous ripoff of THE HUNGER GAMES and now with this movie that ripped a page off David O. Russell's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. I don't know if it's voluntary or not, but Woodley even takes the vocal inflexions of Lawrence in THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. It's annoying and it messed with my suspension of disbelief. Shailene Woodley's emotional range is shallow compared to Jennifer Lawrence's, but it's just another reason to do your own thing. Sylvester Stallone didn't become a legend trying to mimic Marlon Brando.
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS turned out to be one of these movies that didn't leave a coherent impression on me. I guess you can blame middle aged insensitivity for that (at least a little), but I thought it was a cheap and awkward attempt to squeeze tears out of its viewer. Maybe I was over-informed about the nature of the movie and the narrative before getting into it, but the entire thing felt clumsy and opportunistic to me. It would've probably hit me harder back when I was 17 years old and without a girlfriend, but that's what I get for watching young adult movies in a hopeless flight from Istanbul to Montreal. I tried to fit a square peg in a round hole and I failed miserably.