'Paper Towns': Dull 'Gone Girl" for teens
John Greens YA bestseller Paper Towns becomes a stilted teen road movie about a boy (Nat Wolff) looking for his alluring, missing neighbor (Cara Delevingne)
"PAPER TOWNS" is a bit like "Gone Girl," only without all the miserable, horrid people, which takes most of the fun out of it.
It's based on the John Green YA best-seller (why don't teens illegally download books?) about risk-averse high school student Q (Nat Wolff) who spends one crazy night with his charismatic and free-spirited neighbor, Margo (Cara Delevingne), as she enacts her senior-year bucket list of revenge.
She's dynamic, he's smitten - and then she's gone.
The police have questions, but her parents think that she's simply left of her own accord, and so the investigation into Margo's whereabouts is left to Q, who knows that she's fond of leaving clues, and so enlists his nerd pals (Austin Abrams, Justice Smith) to help find and decipher them.
They're soon joined by a few other classmates on a road trip, though the twists and turns of the journey are less important to "Paper Towns" than the camaraderie of the teens on the journey, which, alas, comes off as forced, stilted and charm-starved.
One might say the same for the narrative itself, which combines the group's search for Margo's geographical whereabouts with an abstract inquiry into her quicksilver identity, composed of the impressions of others.
During the process, she appears to Q in a dream, saying, "Before you find yourself, you must lose yourself," a line so nauseatingly awful one hopes it's meant facetiously.
And it is, to a point. We begin to sense early on that Q's idea of Margo gets in the way of the missing girl's true self. Green is teaching his teen audience a lesson in the dangers of freighting others with our own needy fantasies, although this was funnier as a Blake Edwards movie.
Green sorts all of this out with a big reveal, which comes with its own set of problems - the "real" Margo is no more plausible than Q's invented Margo. In fact there is no version of Margo here that isn't irksome - I have a hard time with movies in which a bookish, smart character who plans to become a physician and treat cancer patients gets a lecture from a someone who thinks he should cut class and spend more time covering cars in saran wrap.
And what might have worked as a literary conceit seems dryly conceptual on screen - Margo, after all, is Green's own invention and projection, and registers here as more of a fictional device than a character. The same might be said of Q, or any of the characters in "Paper Towns."
Green's de-romanticized lecturing also sits uneasily with residual teen-male fantasy cliches, like the hot girl who just wants to be known for her personality, and will go to the prom with you if you figure that out.
Sorry, under-sized dweeb clarinet player, but if we are to grant this woman her own independent reality, she's never going out with you. Although try telling that to Woody Allen.
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