It is sad and cruel when cancer strikes — especially when its target is young and otherwise healthy.  The Fault in Our Stars, and presumably the book upon which it is based, suggests that pain and suffering, while hideously unfair, have a place in life and the best way to face such agony is simply to keep on living with passion and optimism.  Tragedy is unavoidable, but tragedy can be less tragic if one fights for all one can before leaving this world.

Josh Boone’s film presents two teenagers who have survived cancer.  Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley) needs a constant oxygen flow to prevent her lungs from filling with fluid, yet she lives an otherwise ordinary life.  Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) has lost a lower leg to cancer, but his disease is in remission.  Gus falls for Hazel pretty quickly and their friendship eventually blossoms into romance, just in time for the Big C to rear its ugly head once more.

The friendship / romance / coming-of-age story is fairly routine, although its characters and dialogue are more original and unique than most teen-themed movies. The teens, and a friend or two, are squarely the focus here; parents and caregivers are most often in the background and relatively unimportant.  But the plot takes a weird turn to Amsterdam, where the duo travel to meet their favorite author, played in a prickly manner by Willem Dafoe.  The Amsterdam scenes seem to be in another movie to me, except that they reiterate the callousness of life that these young people continually face.

Woodley is terrific, fulfilling the promise she showed in The Descendants, as well as Divergent.  She’s going to be a big star.  Ansel Elgort, who played Woodley’s brother in Divergent, is less satisfying to me.  There’s a smugness to his performance that I didn’t care for.  Laura Dern is very good as Woodley’s mother, but then she’s always good.  Audiences have responded to the film in a big way, which is great to see because this type of drama is the antithesis of the usual mindless summer hits.

I like The Fault in Our Stars and do recommend it.  I just didn’t like it as much as so many other people have.  It’s a good movie with strong performances that delivers an emotional punch to the gut.  But I think I would have liked it quite a bit more if the Amsterdam scenes had been conceived differently.  The narrative fights to get past that section and regroup before moving on to its predestined conclusion.  It will definitely make you cry.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  5 July 2014.