Film

‘Paper Towns’ is a tedious teen romance

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Paper Towns

Two and a half stars

Paper Towns Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams. Directed by Jake Schreier. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday.

What seems exciting and life-affirming in romantic movies would often be disastrous in real life, and the annoyingly twee teen romance Paper Towns, based on a novel by The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, demonstrates just how inconsiderate a supposedly exhilarating romantic prospect can be. Margo Roth Speigelman (Cara Delevingne) is a textbook manic pixie dream girl, a term coined by writer Nathan Rabin for the kind of unrealistic flibbertigibbets that populate romantic comedies, existing solely to whisk the timid male protagonists away from their sheltered existences so they can embrace life to the fullest. That Margo’s paramour Quentin (Nat Wolff) eventually realizes how much he idealized and misunderstood her doesn’t make the journey to get there any less tedious.

Neighbors since childhood, Quentin and Margo are barely speaking to each other as the movie begins, with Margo as a popular teen and Quentin a nerdy outcast. But when Margo takes Quentin on a whirlwind night of revenge pranks against people she feels have wronged her, it reawakens his feelings for her. She then promptly disappears, leaving behind a series of clues as to where she may have gone, and Quentin convinces his buddies Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith), along with Margo’s former best friend Lacey (Halston Sage), to help him track her down.

Ignoring Quentin for years, dragging him into a night of illegal activity, then abandoning him without a word and leaving a convoluted mystery for him to solve doesn’t make Margo a very appealing object of romantic affection. Former model Delevingne is certainly beautiful, but Margo is a self-absorbed asshat whose teenage pretensions aren’t nearly as profound as the characters (or the movie) seem to think they are. Quentin eventually learns that the value of his search for Margo was in the journey, not the destination, but that journey isn’t particularly interesting, and the supporting characters along for the ride are as one-dimensional as Margo herself.

Wolff, who played a supporting role in The Fault in Our Stars, has an appealing everyteen quality, but Quentin is such a blank slate that it’s hard to care about his emotional arc. Maybe giving its two main characters cancer was manipulative, but at least Fault felt like it had real stakes, and it was anchored by a powerful performance from Shailene Woodley. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber gave Woodley strong material in both Fault and The Spectacular Now, but they aren’t able to invest Green’s source novel with that same power. Without a central tragedy, Paper Towns is more John Hughes than Nicholas Sparks, but it’s unlikely to define a generation, no matter how hard it strains for meaning. As Quentin eventually discovers about Margo, investing too much in a romantic ideal can end up leaving you feeling disappointed and foolish.

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