Bad title, good film and a sobbing row of teenage girls in front of me at a screening, in this tasteful adaptation of the book by John Green. Hazel (Shailene Woodley) is a sixteen year old girl whose days are numbered. She had thyroid cancer at age thirteen but that’s spread to her lungs, so she depends on an oxygen machine that she lugs around as a cruel reminder of her mortality.
To please her mother (Laura Dern) Hazel finds herself attending a support group with other victims and survivors or cancer. It’s here that she meets Gus (Ansel Elgort) who lost his left leg to cancer. But he doesn’t want to hear Hazel’s cancer story he wants to hear her real story….about “Hazel Grace”…that’s what he calls her.
Unlike the sappy Love Story this is a positive film on love, living, dying and then death. There are no martyrs here.Aside from the test drug that keeps her alive in Indianapolis, new love has given Hazel a reason to live. She’s so present and in control of the fact that she’s a walking grenade that the other healthy characters of the film seem to fade into her spirituality.
As Gus and Hazel’s romance blossoms, the two have pet words “Okay” and cliché behavior…Gus walks around with a cigarette dangling from his lips though unlit, showing that smokers can choose to kill themselves with a single match.
There’s a lot of poignant moments in the story too big to divulge and hurt the surprises, but one comes in the irony of the Anne Frank museum, as a spooky narration hovers where there is hope there is life.” There is an amazing and unexpected performance by Willem Dafoe as Van Houten…an angry Dutch author.
Like she did in Divergent and The Descendants as George Clooney’s amazing daughter losing a comatose mother, Woodley effortlessly performs with a charisma that’s so au naturel and soulful, her sense of self overshadows all other’s performances. ♕♚♛ 1/2