Until last week, The Fault In Our Stars was just a best-selling novel about teenagers with cancer. The runaway, reality-biting Young Adult book by John Green had taken Penguin and tens of millions of readers for a long enough, jolty ride. Now the story, told from the perspective of a 16-year old girl with thyroid cancer in her lungs, has become a major motion picture.
Early on in The Fault In Our Stars, you’ll catch kids with cancer texting, driving, playing video games, reading and flirting. They go in and out of hospital emergency rooms and scanning machines while their parents watch, anxiously, unsure what to do or what will happen next.
I liked this serious movie, despite all the sentiment and blatant over-use of metaphors. Kids who frequent hospitals and live near death lead fascinating lives. They don’t mince words; they call spades, spades. And they’re OK, is part of the messaging among the afflicted fictional teenagers. They want their real audiences to know that much of their circumstances. The problem is, what Green’s kids with cancer choose to say and the movie reveals about them, may not be true. Certainly it’s not the same for all children with serious illness. Okay-ness won’t, necessarily, last.
Hope lives. As do parents, after kids die.
Supreme sadness: Think of Otto Frank. After all that hiding, and wishing, it is only he among his family who survives to read his daughter Anne’s diary and share her story. Not by accident does he pop into TFIOS. This movie is loaded.
The protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster, worries about her parents’ love for her and their future well-being. Gingerly portrayed by the actress Shailene Woodley, she suffers from flashbacks from age 13 or so, after her cancer diagnosis, when she was bald and treatments were failing and her mother was crying. Hazel feels responsible for pain she might deliver, unwittingly or generously by opening up, or by letting down the barriers for getting to know her, intimately, before she dies.
“I’m a grenade” she tells the handsome young man she meets at the cancer support group. Augustus ("Gus") Waters, smilingly played by Ansel Elgort, has lost a leg to osteosarcoma. He’s unafraid.
An oncologist watching this slick movie might get this – what it’s like to get to approach a person with terminal illness. The closer you get, the harder it is. For this reason, some doctors keep a distance. Others lean in. They thrive, genuinely, on the privilege of being “near.” It can be a pleasure to hold the hand of a person who’s seriously ill. And that’s part of what this movie is about.
Hazel has a favorite book, “An Imperial Affliction” by the fictional author Peter Van Houton. She grapples with the fact that his book stops mid-sentence. Hazel wants, almost more than anything, to contact the writer to find out what happens to the characters after the "Affliction" ends. Willem Dafoe terrifically depicts a joyless man, the book-within-the-book's hardened creator. Not to give it away, I should leave his pained, self-destructive soul at that point.
A detail I loved in this story is Hazel’s oxygen tank. She carries it around, like small luggage on wheels, literal “baggage,” wherever she goes. She needs oxygen because her lungs are affected by the thyroid cancer. Without it she fatigues and would, within minutes, suffer organ damage. A quirk is that she drags it around almost always without assistance, such as from her parents. Gus gets this. He doesn’t immediately offer to carry it for her. He understands that Hazel wants to deal with it on her own, and that she’s capable of asking for assistance when needed. He treats her without condescension, as she likes it.
I'm impressed by the social media phenomena that support, and possibly add depth, to this revealing movie with a hashtag, #TFIOS. There’s a blurring of boundaries between people and the stories that encompass or follow them. John Green, the author of the original book says he was inspired by Esther Earl, a teenager in Quincy, Massachusetts. She built a real-life following on YouTube and
Like many films, The Fault has a YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. Several characters are assigned unique virtual spaces. On Tumblr, there's a mish-mash of related posts and flickering images.
Only you can decide if you like this movie. And the only way of knowing, to see how you'll handle it, is to be willing to get nearer the subject of kids with cancer, to spend a brief interval of time there, if only in a theater. The framed, carefully layered picture is nowhere close to the place where Hazel and Gus and their friends really live. But it might give you a clue, an insight, or at least a good cry.
