That’s the main flaw with Josh Boone’s otherwise poignant film. In other words, he’s too good to be true. He even whisks her and her mother (an excellent Laura Dern) off to Amsterdam to meet her favorite author.
He takes her on picnics, they read each other’s favorite books. And he woos Hazel Grace as if his life depended on it you get the impression that in some ways maybe it does. Gus, played by Woodley’s Divergent costar Ansel Elgort, lost his leg to the disease but remains unrelentingly upbeat. Then she meets a cancer survivor named Augustus at a support group, and his sunny worldview throws her. She’s a sarcastic straight shooter who has accepted her fate and isn’t ashamed about the tubes under her nose or the unwieldy oxygen tank she has to lug around like a millstone. Her Hazel Grace, despite a diagnosis of thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, is nobody’s martyr. That’s why they’re lucky to have an actress as effortlessly charismatic and natural as 22-year-old Woodley ( The Descendants, Divergent) as their stand-in. They can sniff out condescension from a thousand yards. A generation of teens like her have been weaned on YA novels (including the 2012 John Green best-seller this is based on), leading to more discerning palates. And it’s safe to say that Hazel Grace would have hated that film. It’s been four decades since Love Story turned young love doomed by cancer into saccharine Hallmark hooey. I like that version as much as the next girl does.” But, she concludes, that’s not the truth. ”On the one hand, you can sugarcoat it - nothing is too messed up that it can’t be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song. ”I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories,” she says. Or rather, what kind they’re not about to see. In the opening voice-over of the funny, sweet, three-hankie tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars, Shailene Woodley’s terminally ill 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster tells the audience what kind of movie they’re about to see.
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