Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Paper Towns" Genuinely Good (PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 1 hr, 53 mins)

Directed by Jake Schreier
Written by John Green, Scott Neustadter,
and Michael H. Weber

Minor Spoiler Warning

Alo Party Peoples.

It's probably safe to say that I was too nice to The Fault in Our Stars. Don't get me wrong, it isn't terrible, it's backed by two promising young actors giving good performances, and it plays with some big ideas for a teenybopper romance story, but it's certainly no masterpiece, and it definitely didn't need to be on the Best of the Year list.* In retrospect I probably wouldn't have given it as much praise as I did if it weren't for it being sort of refreshing to see a YA movie that wasn't 1) yet another dystopia. and 2) actually had some level of thought put into it.

That, I think, is what distinguishes author/vlogger/social media titan John Green from the rest of the YA set. You can debate the actual quality of his various endeavors til' the cows come home, and I'd argue that his literature has only gotten worse ever since he started becoming an Internet celebrity and TFiOS was the first genuinely bad book, but I'd never call him stupid, or shallow, or say that he doesn't put serious thought and effort into his work, and even if The Fault in Our Stars was, in the end, more than a little pandering to the heartstrings of the Tumblrites that turned him into a semi-mainstream figure, it at least felt sincere while it did so and wasn't doing it just to sell books and movie tickets. It was good... for a YA movie.

Paper Towns, fortunately, is a strong enough effort that I can call it a genuinely good movie, no "... for a YA movie" qualifiers necessary. It's certainly a far better final product than The Fault in Our Stars, mostly because it's willing to take more liberties with the source material, keeping Green's mischievous wit intact while infusing it with the same kind of melancholic whimsy and genuine introspection that fuels the work of Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater. It's got the look of YouTube era music videos, the soul of The Breakfast Club, and some little touches of Moonrise Kingdom and Dazed and Confused thrown in for good measure.

Nat Wolff is Quentin, a senior at a high school in Orlando. He and his friends, overly cocky Ben, and sane, grounded Radar have never stepped outside their comfort zone a day in his life. The only time Quentin has ever come close, something he calls a "miracle", is when he was a child, when he lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman. One day the two of them came across a dead body by a tree, and they haven't really talked since, he's just heard stories about her disappearing off to do all sorts of incredible things. Running off to join the circus, opening for indie rock bands, pulling all sorts of incredible pranks, she's a larger-than-life, almost mythic figure. Until a few weeks before graduation, when Cara Delevingne as the grown up Margo invites Quentin out to participate in the pranking, and it looks like it'll be the start of something wonderful....

...until the next day when Margo doesn't show up for school, and the next day, and the next, until it looks like she might be gone for good, so Quentin recruits his friends to head off on a country-spanning road trip to find her.

Sure, that sounds like the most insufferable thing ever, but that's part of the point, and that unreality is where Paper Towns really tramps its perpetual journey. The cinematographer takes most of his cues from music videos, which gives the entire movie the look and feel of one big daydream, Nat Wolff always has a big ridiculous grin on his face, which makes it impossible to forget that what you're watching is an illusion. Practically every plot element, production point, background detail and camera move is designed to hammer in the point that "This is unreal." 

That point even extends to the title. During their night of pranking, Quentin and Margo head up to the top of a skyscraper and she calls the whole place a ...paper town. Full of paper houses and paper people, and I've never once met anyone that cares about anything that matters." Sure, she sounds like a self-absorbed teenager (not unlike many of Green's own fans), but that, again, is part of the point. Once he finally finds Margo, Quentin discovers that his image of her, the girl that runs away from home all the time to do incredible things, the one filled to the brim with way-too-much self confidence, that girl never existed. That was a paper-thin surface level illusion and underneath that Margo is just as human as anyone else. Sure, the message of "See other people as people." isn't exactly a new one, nor is it especially subtle here, but I'd argue that in the Digital Age, when today's youth, the majority of the audience for this movie, experience a huge amount of their social lives through the medium of inhuman words on a screen, (digital paper, if you will) that message couldn't be more important.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

*Before anyone asks, I would put Whiplash in that spot now.