Closet Confidential

You have to admire the brutal ability in this emotional teen movie, based on the colossal young adult bestseller by John Green, which for the most part enforces the silver ring of abstinence with cancer. You have to concede the laser-guided dependability and psychotic vehemence with which it goes for the tear duct. It's like being mugged by a professional whose skills in mixed martial arts you can't help but notice and appreciate, even as you are savagely beaten, then dragged upright, bruised and bleeding, and forced to watch as your assailant gives fully 45% of your money to aid organization.

Shailene Woodley (from Divergent, and Alexander Payne's The Descendants) plays Hazel, a teenage cancer patient, whose thyroid lesions have metastasised to her lungs; her position, once gravely critical, has stabilised due to experimental drug treatment, but she has to wheel around a portable oxygen tank, a lite-tragical accessory. In the support group that her mom (Laura Dern) forces her to attend, Hazel catches the eye of Gus (Ansel Elgort), a cute boy, whose osteosarcoma condition is also stabilised after the amputation of one leg, although this is mostly unknown under his jeans.

They are as rich and awesome as teens in a Nancy Meyers movie, with a quirky, smart, back-talking relationship. Life-affirming Gus likes to have an unlit cigarette in his mouth to show his existential defiance. Despite being such an simple hottie, Gus is a virgin. Hazel's own condition in this respect is apparently so self-evident that she never says it out loud. It is all too clearly Gus's virginity, not his cancer, which is his heartbreaking vulnerability, like Rochester getting to be blind at the beginning and not the end of Jane Eyre. "You two are so adorable," says Hazel's mother, out loud, without anyone nearby screech.

Hazel is obsessed with a novel called An Imperial Affliction with a bafflingly abrupt ceasing, all about a girl dying of cancer, written by a reclusive author called Peter van Houten. (The title may have been inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer-winning study The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.) unprompted, entrancing Gus whisks her and her mom off to Amsterdam to meet her hero, and it is a ride that is to bring their romantic relationship to a crisis.

Now, there may be people who can witness a halfway proficient dramatic representation of the death of children from cancer without choking up. I am not among them – and it was the same before I became a parent. But through the occasional mist of tears, the essential phoney-baloniness of this film looked even worse. Woodley is very good, no doubt about it. What might this talented young star realize if she were in a film which was not fantastically manipulative and crass?

Flashbacks show that Woodley's persona lost her hair when she was 12. It has thankfully grown back, but she is wearing it austerely short. Gus is way cute, and his standard of living, like Hazel's, does not appear to be modified in any appreciable way by his illness. They are both extremely comfortably off, and Gus's bedroom is like a inexperienced man-cave for a wealthy and obnoxious young man – so ostentatious, in fact, that I assumed some learning experience, some comeuppance, was coming his way.

But no. Their respective father and mother are also in this too-good-to-be-true bracket, although Hazel's mom appears to have whispered something extraordinary to Hazel, when she was in a grave situation in hospital years previously. It is a product that Hazel has not forgotten and that should theoretically deepen and complicate their relationship intensely. But the pair just hug it out. It's like it never come about.

The Fault in Our Stars hit a nadir of horror when Hazel and Gus visit the Anne Frank House. The couple are overwhelmed with emotion at their own scenario and make out, while the surrounding crowd melt with romcom bliss, offering approval in various European languages. The Pont des Arts in Paris is becoming choked with padlocks affixed by lovers. Maybe now there will be a nonstop traffic jam of sad snogging teens in Anne Frank's chamber.

The title is taken from Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Perhaps getting cancerous cells was written in the stars for them, but Hazel and Gus realise that it is "in themselves" to do something in response, up to them to make the top of life. That's fair enough. And perhaps therapeutic escapism is the point of The Fault in Our Stars – although Hazel claims that it is the bodily thing. This prettified cancer fantasy comes nowhere near.

 

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