Weber ( The Spectacular Now) dial back on the spikiness that made Hazel’s voice so winning in Green’s novel, and her inner monologue is translated to screen via a gauzier voiceover. Elgort’s performance is more mannered than Woodley’s open-faced, direct line to the heart, but it works: His speeches sometimes tumble out in a mush-mouthed rush, a little over-rehearsed, and that feels true to a teenager who is terribly sweet, eager to please, and ga-ga about a very special girl.Ĭo-screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Woodley and Elgort look like real teens, delicately signaled in their body language: her lip-biting push-pull of awkwardness and pleasure when dealt a compliment the way she lights up when receiving a text message, thinking she’s playing it cool when her parents can see her giddiness big as a billboard and how he postures hard (he uses a prop cigarette, unlit, as a metaphor for staring down death, which sounds about right for an 18-year-old). What is more striking is the film’s tender, relatable chronicling of Hazel and Gus’ new love, a first love that will also most certainly be their last. ![]() That they will fall in love is foregone, even for those who hadn’t already gulped John Green’s gorgeous source novel – director Josh Boone ( Stuck in Love) announces the relationship at the very start of the film, in a flash-forward montage that plays like a trailer, or an early valentine to die-hard fans twitching for that first kiss. A cancer survivor and self-described 18-year-old virgin with only one leg, Gus doggedly ignores Hazel’s efforts to keep a safe distance, keep him in the friend zone. Gus (Elgort) is more foolhardy, or romantic, or maybe just seize-the-day sensible. She attends a weekly teen cancer support group – it makes her parents feel better, at least – but she’s not about letting people in: Hazel is already trying to minimize the collateral damage of her coming death. She worries about her parents (Dern and Trammell), who will inevitably survive her, and she wears the burden of that worry as heavily as the oxygen tank she must lug with her everywhere. Diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in her early teens, Hazel has gained years with the aid of an experimental drug still, there’s never any question that she’s a terminal case. ![]() Yes, teenagers are prone to hyperbole, but when 16-year-old Hazel (Woodley) warns “I’m a grenade,” she’s not far off the mark.
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