Shallowness with a halo

Rating: 4/10 (7 February 2019)

I had very high hopes for this highly acclaimed film. After all, a mature theme (cancer), starring Shailene Woodley to boot (the girl from the Divergent series), what could go wrong, right?! This, to be precise: "Gus jokes about his prosthetic leg, and they meet and fall in love at a cancer support group." Because, yeah, they're not falling in love, are they?! It starts with Gus 'accidentally' bumbing into the girl: he doesn't immediately pull back, but keeps pressed against her. That's your first clue: that isn't love, but teenage lust (and severely lacking in subtlety, at that). Then enter the session room; the boy can't take his eyes off of her, literally, and 'Mr. swooney' himself keeps glancing at her, all the time, even when she tries and break eye-contact. She doesn't seem to mind (from anyone uglier, his behavior would, for sure, have evoked a #metoo moment). Then they go outside, and the boy keeps up his act, heavily coming on to her again, pulling out all the charm stops.
At that point, I was already too disGUSted (pun intended) with the movie. Sure, Shailene Woodley is quite attractive (even with tubes up her nose), but this was not supposed to be flick about 'pretty girl meets handsome boy', was it? And yet, all the opening teenage lust ruins the premiss of the entire film for me, as it uses cancer as a disguise for what turns out to be just two attractive people instantly 'falling in love' (read: lust). And that undermines everything mature about this film, and only resoundingly underscores the shallowest message of all: a pretty boy meets a pretty girl -- despite their dismal circumstances masking it as something else. If the girl had been ugly -- or just mundane even -- and they'd still have fallen in love, that would at least have been something. As it was, though, it was just shallowness with a halo.