Paper Towns: Things aren't as they seem

Paper Towns (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for mild profanity, partial nudity and teen sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.24.15

Today’s teens continue to live in great times, with respect to movies that speak to their experiences.

When Margo (Cara Delevingne) entices Quentin (Nat Wolff) to help her during a late-night
bit of "payback," their first stop is a big-box store, where he grows increasingly nervous
over the unusual items that get tossed into the shopping basket.

Best of all, we’re getting solid, respectful adaptations of existing books, graced with thoughtful, multi-faceted storylines by authors who understand the importance of plot logic, character development and — wait for it — subtlety.

As opposed to, say, this week’s other high-profile release: the bombastic, über-dumb Pixels.

Paper Towns comes from the pen of best-selling teen-lit author John Green, whose most recent novel, The Fault in Our Stars, brightened movie screens last summer. Paper Towns is an earlier work; it’s also a quieter, mildly sneaky narrative that builds to a somewhat unexpected conclusion ... albeit one that feels just right, in hindsight.

The sensitive, finely tuned screenplay comes from Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who certainly know the territory; aside from having scripted The Fault in Our Stars last year, in 2013 they also delivered a poignant adaptation of Tim Tharp’s The Spectacular Now.

Paper Towns is cut from different cloth, most visibly because it doesn’t concern emotional damaged or terminally ill characters. The teens populating this Florida suburb are reasonably ordinary, and in a way that’s the crux of the narrative: None of us wishes an ordinary life, particularly not as a teen. We all hope for something extravagant: or, in the words of our protagonist, the “one miracle” to which he figures everybody is entitled.

In the case of adolescent Quentin “Q” Jacobsen (Josiah Cerio), living in the outskirts of Orlando, his miracle arrives when Margo Roth Spiegelman (Hannah Alligood) and her family move into the house across the street. Just like that, Quentin is smitten. Proximity turns them into bike-to-school buddies, but Quentin soon discovers that Margo is a wild child, whose adventurous nature eventually exceeds his comfort zone.

She’s ... disappointed. She doesn’t exactly say or do anything, but young Alligood’s gaze reflects gentle censure, perhaps even betrayal.

Flash-forward to the present day, toward the end of everybody’s senior year in high school. Quentin (now Nat Wolff) and Margo (Cara Delevingne) have drifted apart, become all but strangers. She has cultivated a semi-scandalous reputation, replete with wild stories passed within the school corridors.

The Fault in Our Stars: Close to faultless

The Fault in Our Stars (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and perhaps too harshly, for thematic elements, chaste sexuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Every generation embraces at least one swooningly poignant saga of star-crossed lovers, which, as a result of massive ticket sales, becomes a media sensation that generates all sorts of commentary, analysis and — the inevitable backlash — scornful snickering.

During one of her rare bouts of utter despair, Hazel (Shailene Woodley) admits that she
has come to regard her childhood back yard playset as quite pathetic, a sentiment with
which Gus (Ansel Elgort) heartily agrees.

The adulation isn’t hard to understand; we’re hard-wired for this sort of stuff. Have been since 16th century audiences crowded the stalls to see performances of Romeo and Juliet. And probably long before that.

As for the snickering, well, sometimes it’s warranted. (See the 1970 adaptation of Erich Segal’s Love Story. Or the book itself, for that matter.)

A very fine line separates artistic success from the sort of puerile, overly histrionic treacle found in TV soap operas. We therefore ask that our melancholy melodramas be intelligent, populated by perceptive characters whose actions resonate with our real-world experiences and expectations, and which — in the case of films — are made by talented actors who respect the material, scripters with an understanding of subtlety, and directors who refrain from artificially enhancing the emotional intensity. With stuff like too many tight close-ups.

I’m therefore happy to report that director Josh Boone’s adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars conducts itself quite honorably. The book’s many, many fans will be delighted to hear key chunks of dialogue and exposition lifted directly from the page, and in a few cases scripters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have improved the story’s overall flow: some judicious nips and tucks here, a couple of droll laugh lines inserted there. (Films are much better than books, when it comes to verbal zingers.)

Mostly, though, this film gets its momentum and emotional heft from star Shailene Woodley’s expressive and heartbreaking performance as 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster, a girl who handles her cancer death-sentence with the sort disarming candor, mocking wit and stubborn strength that we’d hope to call upon, under similar circumstances.

In a word, Woodley is a revelation.

A performance starts with the overall appearance, and Woodley looks right, with the sallow, waxy pallor — the aura of illness — that results from a terminal disease. More significantly, though, she projects brittleness and fragility, as if she might shatter from abrupt contact, or simply collapse as her skeletal frame betrays her.

Green’s book persuasively depicts Hazel’s constant battle for breath, her body badly compromised by the papillary thyroid cancer that spawned — in her own words, as lifted from Green’s text — an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in her lungs. Woodley conveys this gasping struggle for oxygen just as convincingly, her gritty, determined gaze never quite concealing the despair that bubbles behind her eyes.

Admission: Not quite top marks

Admission (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for occasional profanity and mild sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Paul Weitz obviously courts variety; his writing and directing résumé includes everything from dumb comedy (American Pie, Little Fockers) and impudent horror (Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant) to the heartfelt relationship dramedy of About a Boy.

Admissions officer Portia (Tina Fey) can't understand why John (Paul Rudd, right) is so
enthusiastic about getting Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) into Princeton; as far as she can tell,
this young man — although certainly personable — just isn't university material, let
alone Princeton material. But she's about to learn a detail that will seriously
compromise her objectivity.

His newest film, Admission, belongs in the latter’s company; its frequently whimsical, romantic-comedy trappings are blended with some sharp social commentary about the lengths to which parents and students will go, to ensure entry to an appropriately prestigious university.

That’s a delicate balance to maintain, and for the most part scripter Karen Croner succeeds; we’re never quite sure whether it’s appropriate to root for what the central characters seem to want, in this adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s perceptive novel. Even well-motivated actions have unfortunate consequences, and one’s past has a way of revealing that an apparently “comfortable” life may be little more than a façade.

Admission also is a big-screen starring vehicle for Tiny Fey, who needs a solid next step in a career that has been dominated, until recently, by her all-consuming involvement with television’s 30 Rock. Fey is smart, savvy and sharp: an all-around talent who hasn’t always been served well by her occasional trips to the big screen. She was ill-used in trivial fluff such as Date Night and The Invention of Lying, and her more successful presence in Baby Mama had just as much to do with co-star (and frequent cohort) Amy Poehler.

In a nutshell, then, Fey could use a few starring roles that grant her characters with the all-essential blend of intelligence, comic impulsiveness and vulnerability that has made 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon such a delight for so many years. Weitz and Croner come close to granting her the necessary formula in Admission, although Fey’s character here is just a bit too much the helpless victim for my taste. But that’s a personal judgment call, and likely not enough of an issue to bother most viewers.

Portia Nathan (Fey) is an admissions officer at Princeton University, one of the dozen or so “gatekeepers” who evaluate thousands of applicants every spring, and then decide which anxious high school seniors will win entry within these Ivy League walls.

Korelitz is a former part-time application reader for Princeton, so if this aspect of Weitz’s film has the queasy, casually cruel tone of reality, it’s no accident. Korelitz knows the territory, and Croner has done her best to replicate the impossible necessity of such a job: of the need to choose between this gymnast with multiple extracurricular activities, or that impassioned scholar with an aptitude for different languages.

Korelitz’s book employs a narrative device that allows us to eavesdrop on various application essays; Weitz and Croner replicate that gimmick here by having Portia imagine these various young hopefuls standing in front of her, as they eloquently argue their own merits ... only to drop through a hidden trap door and vanish forever, as she regretfully discards yet another fat orange folder.