If you’re looking for a break from post-apocalyptic teen films, you can do no wrong than to check out “Paper Towns”.
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The kid is Quentin (Nat Wolff), a high school senior who has the next 12 years of his life booked: college, med school, marriage, kids.
Among other things they cloak a vehicle in Saran Wrap, complete with a note that reads “That’s a wrap on our friendship”, and share a quick tender moment.
The “may have” turns out to be an essential part of the mystery at the heart of Paper Towns, and what Green is saying in a larger sense about teenage boys and the girls they worship.
As she gets older, Margo (model/actress/European royalty adjacent Cara Delevingne) trades up to the cool crowd, leaving “Q” behind. Even though they pass each other in the halls, the two haven’t spoken in forever, but nonetheless she mysteriously arrives at his window one evening for a midnight adventure and mission of revenge on Margo’s betraying friends.
As for Delavingne’s co-star Nat Wolff, who appeared as the protagonist’s friend in “The Fault In Our Stars” and then played the lead role of Quentin Jacobson in “Paper Towns“, has earned much praise from author John Green.
Quentin soon realizes that Margo left behind some clues for him, so he enlists the help of fellow nerds Radar (Justice Smith) and Ben (Austin Abrams) in his search.
Margo is not any different from her peers – she doesn’t know what the heck she’s doing.
While Wolff also revealed how she wanted to go on a water slide at 2am, when she spotted it in the distance one night during filming. Being one of her first major roles, Delevingne did a wonderful job portraying the disconnect Margo had with her setting and the people that surrounded her in a town she found to be fake. The rhythm of Green’s smart dialogue flowed freely thanks to the direction from Jake Schreier, whose recent work include “Robot and Frank“. He is about wise and illuminating and human and heartfelt, and this film is all of that. That is until the anticlimactic reappearance of Margo, basically a watered-down version of the character Gwyneth Paltrow played in “The Royal Tenenbaums”. Everyone knew her to be something she really wasn’t.
Like the young adult fiction genre, movies, like “Paper Towns” can be enjoyed by a wide variety of audiences due to the coming of age experiences that many can relate to.
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Instead, “Paper Towns” smoothly navigates what could have been treacherous waters, emerging as its own film, one that treats teenagers as people and their problems as simply human. Much like that slice of terminal-disease romance, you might well expect that Paper Towns operates at the usual shrill-emo pitch, once restricted to post-adolescence but now characteristic of an entire Bush 43/Obama generation (I won’t use the M-word).
