The Fault in Our Stars

When Hazel, a 16-year-old girl with managed terminal cancer, falls in love with her friend Gus, she says it happens ‘like falling asleep: very slowly, then all at once’.

The gargantuan success of John Green’s novel, now a film, is similar. The past two years have seen a bumper crop of crossover young adult books, but really not since Harry Potter has a book been as much read by grown-ups as by young people.

A story that could be slush in other hands is witty, realistic and desperately moving in Green’s. It was my favourite book of last year, and I forced it on any number of friends who in turn fell in love. I won’t be doing the same with the film, but feel free to borrow my Kindle if you so desire.

At her mother’s request, Hazel (Shailene Woodley) reluctantly agrees to attend the local support group for ‘cancer kids’, where she meets the new boy, Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort). They share a mordant wit, a love of reading and films, and cancer, of course.

Gus, in remission after losing his lower leg, cheerfully pines for Hazel, who refuses to get close to him as she sees herself as a grenade, destined to destroy those around her with her inevitable death. Her defence is her favourite book, a novel about a girl with cancer, and its perceived perfection leads Hazel and Gus to follow its author to Amsterdam.

Neither book nor film makes the teenagers superheroes; cancer is simply a dreadful thing that is part of their lives. The important bit for the pair is being a teenager, and trying to actually have a life. They joke about ‘cancer perks’, and share the horror of spending Make-A-Wish wishes on Disney trips. They egg a girl’s house for dumping their friend, another cancer kid, before he has an operation to remove his remaining eye.

But this is Hollywood. Hazel’s, and arguably Green’s, novel may be nearly perfect, but the reality can’t live up to it. While Woodley and Elgort try their best, the schmaltz content is still astronomically high. A romantic scene in Anne Frank’s house that just about works in print, fails horrendously on screen, partly because of Hazel and Gus’s trait of grinning at each other like Labradors having a face-off. It’s not quite Nicholas Sparks-does-cancer, but at times it comes perilously close.

The film’s success comes from playing up nuances that are less clear in the book. Hazel may think of herself as a grenade, but she doesn’t see the layers of devastation on her parents’ faces, the speed at which they answer her casual call.

Laura Dern and Sam Trammell play their supporting roles with great skill and sensitivity, and a repeated shot of Dern’s face crumpling as a younger Hazel falls into a coma is quite devastating.

When Green’s wit is allowed full rein, you get an insight into an extraordinary film. As it is, this is merely like Hazel and Gus’s shared refrain: okay.