They are both extremely comfortably off, and Gus's bedroom is like a starter man-cave for a wealthy and obnoxious young man – so ostentatious, in fact, that I assumed some learning experience, some comeuppance, was coming his way.īut no. Gus is way cute, and his lifestyle, like Hazel's, does not appear to be modified in any appreciable way by his illness. It has thankfully grown back, but she is wearing it austerely short. What might this talented young star achieve if she were in a film which was not fantastically manipulative and crass?įlashbacks show that Woodley's character lost her hair when she was 12. But through the occasional mist of tears, the essential phoney-baloniness of this film looked even worse.

I am not among them – and it was the same before I became a parent. Now, there may be people who can witness a halfway competent dramatic representation of the death of children from cancer without choking up. (The title may have been inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer-winning study The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.) Impulsive, entrancing Gus whisks her and her mom off to Amsterdam to meet her hero, and it is a journey that is to bring their relationship to a crisis.

Hazel is obsessed with a novel called An Imperial Affliction with a bafflingly abrupt ending, all about a girl dying of cancer, written by a reclusive author called Peter van Houten. 'You two are so adorable,' says Hazel's mother, out loud, without anyone nearby screaming. It is all too clearly Gus's virginity, not his cancer, which is his heartbreaking vulnerability, like Rochester getting to be blind at the beginning and not the end of Jane Eyre.

Hazel's own condition in this respect is apparently so self-evident that she never says it out loud. Despite being such an obvious hottie, Gus is a virgin. Life-affirming Gus likes to have an unlit cigarette in his mouth to show his existential defiance. They are as rich and attractive as teens in a Nancy Meyers movie, with a quirky, smart, back-talking relationship. In the support group that her mom (Laura Dern) forces her to attend, Hazel catches the eye of Gus (Ansel Elgort), a cute boy, whose osteosarcoma condition is also stabilised after the amputation of one leg, although this is mostly concealed under his jeans. Shailene Woodley (from Divergent, and Alexander Payne's The Descendants) plays Hazel, a teenage cancer patient, whose thyroid lesions have metastasised to her lungs her condition, once gravely critical, has stabilised due to experimental drug treatment, but she has to wheel around a portable oxygen tank, a lite-tragical accessory.

The fault in our stars novel