PAPER TOWNS HAS SUBVERSIVE CHARM
Even though heroine will make you want to run screaming into the night
Margo ( Cara Delevingne), is the sort of hypercolour enchantress who crawls in through the windows of teenage boys, then whisks them away on a night of adventure. She insists on putting capital letters in the middle of words because she thinks the rules of writing are unfair to the other letters. She loudly proclaims she’s a ninja, and speaks either in a practised faux- wisdom ( starting sentences with “One must?”), or an even more practised portentous cool (“We bring the rain on our enemies”). She abandons people on a whim, leaving a breadcrumb trail of clues as to where she might have gone.
She is, in short, the kind of person who, if she was drowning, would make most of us want to throw her a brick with the word “life preserver” written on it. Most of us are not geekily moony teenage boys in middling suburbs of unremarkable big cities ( Orlando, in this case), though; Quentin ( Nat Wolff), who is, is so taken with this emotional fantasy of a girl he goes on an obsessive quest to follow her clues and track her down when she ghosts after one night of wild adventures together. ( Though, in fairness, he has been creepily carrying a torch for her from afar for like nine years, so.)
To give Paper Towns — and, by extension, YA feelie author of the moment John Green — credit where it is due, it does eventually subvert this totally ridiculous trope, albeit in a way that’s more about subverting a trope to make your story seem more “real” than actually trying to reflect reality. But it does have some clue of how dumb this is, which is something, and it’s generally clever and sincere enough to be a reasonably charming walk through the last days of a nice boy’s high school career, which is something more.
If it has to ride a manic pixie to get there, so be it; let’s just hope the people who are infatuated with Margo, at the beginning truly swallow the lesson at the end.
In between is a lot of reasonable, by- the- numbers stuff about growing up and learning to appreciate the people around you, given a spit polish by a group of young actors capably pulling off snottily hammy ( Austin Abrams as the group’s hapless horn dog), or constantly wavering on the edge of embarrassment ( Justice Smith as the obligatory hint of diversity, given the quirky touch of having parents who are trying to build the world’s biggest collection of black Santas).
Delevingne is more or less ideally cast as a relentlessly annoying teenaged fantasy, while Wolff continues a trend in vaguely sarcastic stand- ins as romantic leads, that this fellow brunette milquetoast can only decry as coming a decade too late. ( You young- millennial projecting introverts have no idea how lucky you are to be coming of age with stuff like this as your pop- cultural touchstone.)
Following the mystery injects some welcome momentum into what’s otherwise the standard laundry list of end- of- school projects — finding a date for prom, getting in one last ( or first), party, wringing hands about the future — and Green does have a way with the mildly pathetic drama of geeky youth, the way everything is simultaneously world- changing and yet obviously not.
(“It’s not a party if there’s a tuba there,” Smith ruefully notes, in maybe the best of a series of sharp lines on the limited scope of their lives.) It’s not quite enough to overcome the bait- and- preach of the central couple, but it has a bead on the misplace melancholy of teenagers all the same.