Maybe they’ll take stock of their young lives the same way the characters do, without the sword of cancer hanging over their heads.Īnd they’ll learn the cliches, even as a nice, metaphoric lecture about cigarettes is tucked in between the dates, the animated text messages, the wish-fulfillment fantasy and the tragedy that may be the only “true” thing “The Fault in Our Stars” actually manages.Calling The Fault in Our Stars a 'teenage cancer romance' might be understating the film's laudable qualities but it's also a reasonably accurate three-word summary of the plot. Maybe they’ll find the stunningly obvious plot to be surprising and fresh. Dern took the role for one or two good scenes the rest of the supporting cast makes little impression.īut this long Josh Boone (“Stuck in Love”) film based on a John Green novel isn’t meant to be a movie for people who remember when TV had “disease of the week” weepers. Woodley, dazzling in “The Descendants” and “The Spectacular Now,” is merely a convincing lure for Elgort, who lifts his game to hang with her, though not quite enough to make the literary locutions of Gus come out sounding natural. The cancer jokes keep it light - “I love it when you talk ‘medical’ to me.”Īnd the stars hit it off well enough. Another familiar touch: Hazel forcing her favorite book on her new beau, and them communicating with the author (Willem Dafoe), who turns out to be how authors in such scenarios always are. One cliche of such movies is how healthy the sickly look - up until that moment that we know is coming, when they do actually look sick. But they can’t spend all of their energy worrying about their parents’ worrying about them, trying to be brave for the grownups’ sake. Thus begins a chaste but adorably sweet romance between two people who have that one thing in common, and are just old enough to know better than to let this happen.

The fault in our stars movie pictures