Have you met Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), the most contemptible Wes Anderson character to not star in a Wes Anderson film? Well, she’s the object of desire for one Quentin Jacobsen (Nat Wolff), or “Q” as he’s constantly referred to in Paper Towns, a film so easy to hate it’s almost as if it was created for that specific purpose. Adapted from the novel by John Green (“The Fault in Our Stars”), the hope here is to mimic the success of the previous adaptation, but there isn’t even an inkling of the humanity, romance or humor found in The Fault in Our Stars to save this film from its loathsome self.
We meet Q at the tender age of nine-years-old as his 18-year-old self tells us he believes in miracles. Every one of us receives at least one miracle in our lifetime he says and for him it’s when Margo moves in across the street. It’s love at first sight (for him) and soon they are bike-riding together and sneaking out on midnight adventures after discovering a suicide victim in the park. However, given Margo’s adventurous ways and Q’s more cautious sensibilities, the two begin to drift apart, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping one stalker eye on Margo from afar.
Q tells us of her adventures — the time she ran away and joined a circus and the time she ran away from home and became a roadie with a touring band — and yet she would leave clues for people to find and mysteries to solve explaining where she’s disappeared to and that she’s okay. Flash forward nine years later and Q and Margo have hardly said a word to one another in all these years. She’s moved on, become one of the cool kids while he’s maintained good grades, is going to Duke with aspirations to be an oncologist and has a pair of friends in the timid Radar (Justice Smith) and Ben (Austin Abrams), a sad excuse at comic relief and a reminder of how bad Gangster Squad was (he played the shoeshine boy) and how good Dumb and Dumber was (they attempt to mimic the peeing in a beer bottle while driving scene).
All these years have passed and Q is still stuck on Margo, watching from his bedroom window as she kisses her boyfriend and heads out to a party, but all that watching from afar is about to pay off. One night Q is woken from his slumber by the sound of Margo breaking into his room. She’s on a mission and wants to “borrow” his car (of course she does!) so she can exact revenge on her group of friends after learning her boyfriend has been cheating on her with one of her other friends. A trip to the hardware store takes place, blackmail, saran wrapping a car and a bit of eyebrow waxing later and Q and Margo end the night dancing to elevator music from the top floor of the SunTrust bank building. If you don’t hate this movie yet, just wait.
The next day Margo disappears. Where did she go? And here Q thought he had finally connected and they’d live happily ever after. WRONG! Margo is gone, or is it missing? I can’t remember, her parents tell the cops there’s a difference, but they don’t care one way or the other. Neither do the cops so why should we? Oh, because it’s true love right? Margo means for Q to chase her and solve the mystery, like some adolescent game of hide and go seek, but where could she be?
Suddenly clues begin to appear and Q puts together the mystery, tracing her to a “paper town” in New York. Oh, did I forget to mention they live in Orlando? Yeah, they live in Orlando, but Q (who at this point just merely seems like a crazy person), his friends and late additions to the party in Lacey (Halston Sage whose performance reminds me of an amalgamation of Rachel McAdams and Rachel Bilson) and Radar’s girlfriend, Angela (Jaz Sinclair), take Q’s mother’s minivan (no worries, she doesn’t need it) and head up to New York to find Margo. Road trip!
From here it’s all kooky antics, roadside sex, prom date miracles, Ansel Elgort and near-death experiences with stray cattle, all in an attempt to find a character you are bound to hate with the heat of the sun by the film’s end.
Paper Towns is a movie where the minutes pass like hours, the emo rock music flows and a character actually says, “A paper town for a paper girl,” and the person it’s said to accepts it as if it were William Shakespeare that wrote it.
Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who also wrote (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, you would expect a lot more than what this film has to offer. Perhaps directors Marc Webb, James Ponsoldt and Josh Boone were able to elevate the work of this screenwriting duo and we’ve been duped all along, or, more likely, John Green’s novel was never all that good in the first place and there was nothing Neustadter, Weber and director Jake Schreier could do to salvage it. In speaking with a few people that have read “Paper Towns” I’m leaning toward the latter, but either way the final product is so bad I have a hard time believing anyone will be able to walk away with a single good thing to say.
