Film Review: The Fault In Our Stars (2014)

"Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget."

Incredibly bored and emotional one day, I decided it was about time to watch a film that would make me cry all the pain out. Oh boy, was this it.

These macabre, cancer novels and films have been done so much before that it can be characterised as a genre in itself. This is embellished when during the beginning of the film, the initiation of the characterisation of Hazel, I was bored to say the least. The film then evolves into something of greater contemplation and Hazel's character becomes somewhat obselete in the backdrop.

Based on John Green's bestseller novel of the same title, The Fault In Our Stars, is a story about two cancer sufferers that meet in a support group that, not so unexpectedly, fall in love with each other. Gus (Elgert) and Hazel (Woodley) connect via their profound admiration for their respective favourite novels. Hazel's is one titled 'An Imperial Infliction' with a story of its own bearing strikingly close resemblence to Hazel's life as a cancer sufferer who will eventually one day leave all her loved ones behind. It is to this fact that Hazel questions the ending of the novel which ends mid-sentence, yet inextricably is in search for the answers regarding herself when she dies.

Hazel is unaware of the fact that in this journey of finding the answer to the novel, involving her briefly enjoying a trip in Amsterdam with Gus to meet the author, that the answers are all in front of her.

The film is one of tragic, teenage-like love and drama. It is destined to leave you in tears and sobbing, surprisingly, in tears that are of a niche sadness. The film is placed on a road of subtlety and you are overcome with emotion because you are immersed so greatly in the position of Hazel that her enlightenment will shock you too.

It would be desirable to ensure that you approach the film with little-to-none cynicism and allow yourself to be immersed in the positions of the characters involved, even minute ones. What one would perceive to be a minor character, Hazel's mother, you will grow to realise her character development and what she has to say about Hazel's status which I like to characterise as evolutionary is pinnacle to the subtext of the narrative which you will only be enlightened about at the ending. The contemptuous nature of Van Houten that is portrayed so effectively by Dafoe is an answer in itself, their meeting foreshadowing the future of the loved ones that Hazel will leave behind, yet paradoxically that she herself unknowingly is prone to as well. Becoming agitated at having received no answers from Van Houten, Gus and Hazel spend the rest of their trip in Amsterdam together, and at the second encounter with Van Houten, he says in Latin "life comes from life", which Hazel shrugs off and scolds him for returning. Only when she realises what Gus has done that she realises that Van Houten is a caricature of all the answers she'd been searching for and that he is (in a hard-to-swallow nature) correct.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, I guess it's because I am a late-teen, young adolescent that approaches films that I know are heavily poached with drama with great sensitivity to my emotional boundaries.

Oh another thing I really loved about the film is the soundtrack. Featuring vocals from Ed Sheeran, Birdy and Charli XCX, everything worked cohesively to create emotion and allow yourself to be in the shoes of the characters.