While the underlying theme of the story is cancer and teenagers dealing with its difficulties, the film focuses primarily on the resolve of the human spirit and the importance of friendship when the going gets tough. This theme is what guides the emotion of the film and gives these young actors the opportunity to shine together for the second time in 2014. Shailene Woodley (Hazel Grace Lancaster) performs her ass off as a seventeen year-old girl who is struggling not only with the troubles of cancer but with being a teenager and falling in love. She faces the trials and tribulations of every other teenager in the world but she carries so much more on her back in her formative years than most have to over the course of their entire lives. Woodley delivers the difficulties of her character’s affliction with precision and perfection. While she perfectly portrays this struggling young girl (she struggles with more than the difficulties that are seen on the outside), Elgort steals the show with his quirky and endearing performance. His character has the power to draw in each and every one of the people around him and Elgort’s ability to deliver on this makes not only the character endearing but Elgort as well. Gus changes so much from the beginning to the end and Elgort changes so gracefully with the character. His sense of humor and his resolve turn to intensity and bitterness and Elgort does not miss a beat in this transition. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber scripted one of the most cohesive and coherent stories ever developed for film using the marvelous foundation crafted by John Green just two years prior. Very little was left to the imagination and next to nothing was lost as the story progressed. Audiences never had to ask themselves what something meant or when something happened because everything was done with purpose and exactitude. Everything that John Green, Augustus Waters, Hazel Grace Lancaster and even Issac (Nat Woolf) wanted to tell us, even when figurative, was clear as day. The meaning behind the intensity and the meaning behind the love is easily transferred from screen to viewer without anything being lost in the process. A somber and true ending wrap what had been building for some time and, while closure is not always something people have the luxury of receiving, closure is what the characters and the audience were fortunate enough to receive at the end of Josh Boone’s intoxicating film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2582846/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
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