I’ve been known to mist up at a good iced tea commercial, so tear-jerkers have a friend in me. But the way “The Fault in Our Stars” throws adorable dying teens all over the place strikes me as calculated. At one point, I expected the dog from “Marley & Me” to wander in just to go paws up.
Yet the movie version of the breathlessly beloved John Green best-seller (a book that, after one page, I sadly replaced on its shelf, but only because I had no lighter fluid and matches at hand) partly redeems itself with a thoughtful second half. In the end, to my surprise, the rusty gears of the waterworks began to whir.
Shailene Woodley, already a subtle and rangy actress, easily carries the film as Hazel, a worldly-wise teen living with terminal cancer who, at a lame support group, instantly falls for a jocular jock named Gus (Ansel Elgort, trying too hard to be charming) who lost a leg to cancer and is not yet out of danger. For comic relief, there’s a sidekick (Nat Wolff) who has lost both eyes and enjoys wrecking stuff.
I’ve no objection to getting rich pandering to tweens. Nor do I find wisecracks an inferior coping strategy to, say, religion or therapy, but couldn’t the movie come up with some witty ones? Instead, the script is littered with clichés: “Welcome to my humble abode,” “So, yeah, that just happened,” “This silence is deafening.” Even attempts to be profound come out like this: “Cancer sucks.” The emo soundtrack is sweetly endearing, but some portion of the dialogue should have been rewritten. Say, 97 percent of it.
The romance progresses fitfully and with a curious lack of sensuality (I’ve seen handshakes that were lustier than the sex scene). The girl and the boy break up, then think better of it. There’s no money to go to Amsterdam, where their favorite writer lives, until suddenly there is.
That Dutch-American author, played by Willem Dafoe as a surly crank in pajamas who has scotch for breakfast, steers the movie in a more mature direction: He compares the couple’s childish belief that the characters in his book continued existing after the final page to the equally absurd belief in life after death. The teens, reflecting on a lesson we should all learn (no author can live up to what he is on the page), have their first kiss at . . . the Anne Frank House. Yet the scene works. Take that, cancer. You Nazi.
In the second half, with the forced jauntiness largely forgone, the movie takes a deep breath and realizes it’s nobler to be an effective formula drama than a wan comedy. Yes, this is still a hypocritical Real Deal that shows someone undergo chemo without mussing, let alone losing, any hair.
But the contemplation of teens picking out their own funeral clothes, and writing eulogies to one another, is sweet heartbreak. No miracle beckons, having a loving family only does so much and there is much talk of oblivion. Hey, but look on the bright side: At least nobody in this movie will ever have to see “The Amazing Spider-Man 3.”