Josh Boone (2014)

John Green, the author of the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, wanted to write a corrective to stories about teenage cancer sufferers that:

‘… sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity.’

The film adaptation of the novel, directed by Josh Boone (his second feature) from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, more or less succeeds in achieving Green’s aim – in, for me, an unfortunate way.  The three main characters are:  Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), whose thyroid cancer has spread to her lungs; Isaac (Nat Wolff), whom Hazel meets at the support group she unwillingly attends and who loses both his eyes to retinal blastoma; and his friend Augustus ‘Gus’ Waters (Ansel Elgort), who comes along to the group to support Isaac.  Gus’s osteosarcoma is in remission but part of one leg has had to be amputated.  The trio’s vocal and verbal mannerisms and humour make them as tedious to listen to as any able-bodied American middle-class teenager yet I found myself making allowances for this:  I felt I shouldn’t find the kids too annoying because they were terminally ill and/or disabled by their cancer.

In her opening voiceover, Hazel explains that what we’re about to see is not the usual movie treatment of relationships in the shadow of fatal disease – not a ‘sugar-coated love story soundtracked to a Peter Gabriel song’. To a large extent, though, this is what The Fault in Our Stars turns out to be.  Shailene Woodley is admirable as Hazel but the music, of which there’s plenty, is sweet and wet.  (This goes both for the score, by Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, and the selection of songs by, among others, Ed Sheeran, Birdy and Lykke Li.)  There’s rather little of the physical rigours of Hazel’s and Gus’s terrible illnesses.   The film confirms that, as a subject for screen drama, living with cancer doesn’t compare with dying from cancer or, especially, experiencing the loss to cancer of someone you love.  The action is fairly boring until things start happening, quickly, during the three-day trip which Hazel, her mother Frannie (Laura Dern) and Gus make to Amsterdam.

The main purpose of the visit is for Hazel to meet Peter van Houten, the author of a novel, ‘An Imperial Affliction’, about a girl with terminal cancer which Hazel reads repeatedly.  (She admires van Houten as ‘the one person who’s been able to describe what it’s like to be dying but who’s still alive’.)  On their first evening in Amsterdam, Hazel and Gus go for a meal in one of the city’s top restaurants, compliments of van Houten, and realise they’re in love.  Next day, they meet the man himself.  The reclusive van Houten (Willem Dafoe) turns out to be a miserable, misanthropic, cruel-tongued bastard.  His mortified assistant Lidewij (Lotte Verbeek), who set up the appointment with van Houten and the restaurant for Hazel and Gus, tries to make things better by taking the young Americans to Anne Frank’s House.  Hazel’s grave respiratory problems make climbing the many stairs very difficult but she struggles to the top and is revived by Anne Frank’s spiritual example and the voice impersonating her on the audio guide.  Back at their hotel, Hazel and Gus have transcendent sex.  They’ve hardly got dressed when Gus reveals that his cancer has returned and metastasised.  This is something he’s known for a while but which he’s kept from Hazel – and, in order to give his news maximum tragic impact, from the audience.

Shailene Woodley was one of the better things in The Descendants and, as Hazel, her acting is remarkably concentrated and consistent.  She’s very persuasive as a girl who discovers, to her amazement, that she has much more emotional room for manoeuvre than she realised.  Ansel Elgort, although irritating in the early stages when Gus is all grins and disarming jokes, can act, and his look of wholesome good health does make Gus’s eventual demise shocking.  Nat Wolff does well as Isaac.  The parents in the story get a relatively raw deal, though.  With her squinched eyes and brave smiles, Laura Dern, even allowing that she’s playing a mother trying desperately to be positive, is exhaustingly supportive.  Sam Trammell, as Hazel’s strangely boyish and uneasy father, is easier to take but a bit odd.  One of the most interesting moments in the film comes at an early stage, when Hazel says she spends a lot of her time trying to please her parents.  (It’s the reason why she grudgingly agrees to go to the support group.)  This suddenly made me realise that I’d always assumed that perhaps the only consolation of being in Hazel’s position would be that you, the dying child, would be unfailingly indulged.   At Gus’s funeral, Hazel nearly decides not to read the eulogy she’s prepared (and which, at his request, she delivered at a ‘pre-funeral’ so that Gus could hear it) but changes her mind when she sees the stricken faces of his parents.  Her change of heart and realisation that funerals ‘aren’t for the dead – they’re for the living’ are hardly original but they resonate with the earlier pleasing-the-parents insight.

It also makes sense therefore that, when Peter van Houten suggests that Hazel is used to getting her own way, this particularly infuriates her.  Otherwise, this episode is weak in several respects.  Given that van Houten refuses to answer fanmail, it’s improbable that Lidewij (who doesn’t bother to clear the hundreds of envelopes from the floor of his house) would set up the meeting with Hazel and Gus.  Van Houten ridicules Hazel for wanting to know what happens to the other characters in ‘An Imperial Affliction’, ‘after the novel ends’.  Insensitive though his reaction is, she does seem too old and too intelligent to be asking this kind of question.  You know van Houten is bound to reappear later on, to make it worth Willem Dafoe’s while.  More important, you need to know what effect the shattering and traumatic meeting with him has on Hazel’s continued reading of his novel.  But at least the novelist’s personal circumstances – his young daughter died of leukaemia – aren’t treated as an excuse for his behaviour.  In his final letter to van Houten, Gus describes him as the antithesis of himself – a good writer but a shitty person.

Hazel Grace Lancaster’s own terminal illness gives her a distinctive perspective on the death of Gus but, since she’ll die ‘after the story ends’, she’s also a familiar figure in a tale of this kind:  the survivor who loses the love of her life.  The Fault in the Stars as a book was a huge commercial success, widely praised by critics, and the film is following in the novel’s footsteps but it would be worth knowing how popular either has been with young men (or young straight men, at least).   More remarkable, though, and hard to argue with, is what the book has come to mean to those of John Green’s readers who are themselves afflicted with cancer, as described in Margaret Talbot’s recent profile of Green in the New Yorker[1]. Green is a big name not only in young adult fiction but also in video blogging:  his online activity and reputation have clearly been a factor in turning The Fault in Our Stars and, by extension, the disease from which some of his and the book’s admirers suffer, into a shared, social experience.

9 July 2014

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/09/140609fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all