This decade's Love Story, Ghost, Titanic...

Rating: 9/10 (11 June 2014)

The good ones are the hardest to write about. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations...
The Fault in Our Stars (henceforth TFiOS) is a story of first love, of how to deal with loss and the business of dying, of giving a number from 1 to 10 to the pain you are feeling, and a wake up call to how you want to play the game of life with the cards you are dealt with. The teenage lovers depicted in TFiOS are cancer sufferers stage IV.
It sounds like one pretentiously powered to the nth degree emotional manipulative tale. IMHO it isn't and has this almost evangelical sheen gleaming like a halo at the seams. It breaks your heart not because it's sad. It does that by swelling your heart with beauty until it burst. It's sad but it's also very funny and insightful, with the right blend of levity and honesty. It tackles big subjects - life, death, love. And it does it amazingly well, constantly buoyant with a hope even in the face of death. I know the book first and the movie feels like the actual movie that played in my head when I read the book. The movie is extremely faithful to the book.
Movies of this sort live or die on one thing - the chemistry between the leads. The chemistry is spot-on perfect. The two are kindred spirits, sharing an irreverent sense of humor and immense charm, and watching them fall in love even as they face universal questions of the human condition - How will I be remembered? Does my life, and will my death, have meaning? - is deeply moving. Shailene Woodley, I know since The Descendants and The Spectacular Now. But they IMHO are not "sit up in your seat and see me" material. I see Woodley not as a young Jennifer Lawrence, but an actress with a sweet fragility. TFiOS is her star making role. She embodies the role of Hazel Grace Lancaster so well I couldn't see another actress in it. Love how she plays her - she is not your archetypal teenager suffering from cancer. Ansel Elgort, I only know from Carrie in a dumb role. His performance is pitch-perfect and winsome. Together they are simply marvelous (I know both of them played sister and brother in Divergent but I have yet to see it).
The supporting cast did a superb job too and each of them has good scenes to shine in. I thought Willem Dafoe was superbly cast as Van Houten. He totally imbues the character of a bile-spitting curmudgeon. I hate him but I also pity him.
If I have to nitpick, I would say Dafoe's character is the weak spot. He feels like a simple plot device right at the end. In book form, I could see the over-arching purpose, but in the film his purpose seems simplified. But I am really nitpicking and scrapping the bottom of the barrel. IMHO TFiOS is near flawless and for a runtime of over 2 hours, we didn't feel the narrative was long drawn. And it has one of the most creative and cutest ways of showing SMSes and emails on screen (I bet it will be copied soon). It's a movie that like pain, demands to be felt and I hope people will fall in love with it like how we fall asleep, slowly at first and then all at once.