I cried fourteen times during the movie. Most of the tears were of the mist variety, though it’s hard to say because I wear contacts, which have a tendency to dry out my eyes. I never exceeded a total of two tears, one from each eye. My right eye was much sadder than the left, and often produced a tear that spilled down my cheek until I wiped it away with the pointer finger of my right hand.
Going in, I had planned on crying. I was looking forward to crying. I won’t explain why because I’m not sure that I had any particular reason other than that I knew the movie was intended to make me cry, and that I wasn’t going to resist that. I was going to row out of the theater on a river of tears.
It’s fortunate then that the movie, The Fault in Our Stars, is actually good. Though by good I suppose I mean something like very well-acted. Certainly there were roles that were miscast or underdeveloped. Hazel’s father’s hair was too puffy and long, leaving him looking far more like the dad from an ABC family special than the father of a cancer patient. Shouldn’t he have shaved his head in solidarity? His lines were weak and weakly delivered, but I’m digressing from the main point of the movie, which is that it was good.
Was the lead a bit too charming? Perhaps. I haven’t read the book, and I don’t know how the character of Augustus Waters was supposed to come off, but he comes off in the movie as too self-assured by half. He’s charming, and he knows he’s charming, and one of the biggest exhales I had in the movie is when his friend eulogized him by beginning, “He was a cocky bastard.” For indeed, he is way too self-assured for an 18 year old, though the actor, Ansel Elgort, plays it so convincingly that it’s tough to not fall for him a bit. And it’s clear that it would be nearly impossible not to fall for him as a 17 year old girl, expertly played by Shailene Woodley. (And yes, we’d all cut the bit with the cigarette and the metaphor. It was too much).
The point is, either you find their love story captivating from the beginning, or you kind of want to punch Gus in the face just to wipe the smug and handsome look on his face. Except, he has cancer and is missing a leg, and the girl he’s falling in love with has cancer, and is not sure how soon she’ll die.
I had a friend tell me that she stopped reading the book because the kids sounded too pretentious. “Who’s a philosopher at 17?” I suspect that death makes mini-philosophers out of all of us. And I imagine that having a possible or ensuing end date would cause most of us to reflect poignantly, intelligently, and angrily at the cosmos. Because, in a way, wtf cosmos?
I’ve digressed again, but I can’t come up with seventeen different ways of saying that these two actors so deeply inhabited the characters, brought them to life that you start to feel real shitty about their impending deaths. And suddenly every slow song or revelation about moving on, or not letting go, is not a movie cliché, though of course it paradoxically is, but an occasion for tears, because, wtf cosmos? Why did you create this movie if other than to make me weep?
The central conceit of Gus’ character is that he wants to do something spectacular in the world rather than just live and die in an ordinary life. If the lesson that Hazel tries to teach him is cliché, live in the now, love those closest to you, this is spectacular you idiot, it’s because the lesson and the sentiment are pretty common for human beings. Why am I here? To do something great! It’s an illusion, and like most illusions, it doesn’t really bring much happiness.
The central conceit of the movie, teenage love as some sort of bulwark against the encroaching cancer, is pretty spot on. Because nothing else makes you feel so damn unique and special as being and falling in love. With good reason, one other soul in the universe has chosen you out of the billions of other souls, or minds or bodies or whatever and decided that you are special. It’s really one of the few times in life that it feels genuinely special to be you, which is pretty much a great juxtaposition to the cancer narrative, which is simultaneously implying that it’s pretty terrible to be you. To hold these two opposing ideas together makes for a good narrative.
I think I’ve covered far fewer plot points than I do in a typical review and that’s not really an accident. The movie made me feel intensely that these two people had fallen in love with one another and then it made me feel intensely that they were in the midst of dying. It turns out that that’s the sort of thing that pulls the tears right out of you. It’s been a while since I felt two characters that intensely connect in a film. Even if some of the particulars were imperfect, the two leads were so damn close to perfect that if you weren’t weeping during the movie you were just kind of being an ahole, someone who doesn’t cry at movies, or life. In less you’re a stoic, (which is all well and good. I read a passage from Plutarch called, Consolation to his Wife, which implores her not to mourn the death of their toddler son, but to think fondly on all of the wonderful time that they had together with him as a blessing), which is fine. If you aren’t, I hope you brought tissues.
A friend of mine shared piece with me from The Atlantic that interrogates the very idea of being ashamed at crying. It’s worth a look if you’re the type of person who enjoys a good discussion of grief and shame and culture. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/whats-wrong-with-sentimentality/360355/.
I should tell you now that when I walked out of the theater I reflected on how good it had been to cry. It’s strange how we coast through life, until a good cry, or a phone call, temporarily wakes us up, grounds us in the moment—makes the smooth edge of the escalator sliding through our fingers feel palpable, you notice a certain graininess to it that isn’t so much gross, but a reminder that we are sharing these experiences in our lives, that our lives are meaningful, if brief. It's nice to feel the warmth of the sun, or the mist of a soft rain. It is good, I suppose I'm saying, to be alive.
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