New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Margo’s disappearance, appropriately, makes bigger waves here than it does in the book; far from accepting it as the latest instance in an ongoing series of events, the school is vocally and audibly spinning up theories about where she could have gone. Because we in the audience have only known Margo for a sum total of about 15 minutes so far (a solid 10 of which involved her enacting vengeance), the movie is more unsure than the novel as to what type of pull she exerts to elicit this kind of reaction.

The depth of Quentin’s obsession with piecing together clues and locating Margo is also lessened, although this is most likely due to time constraints; if Paper Towns the book is a slight 300-ish pages, Paper Towns the movie is an even slighter 109 minutes. The effect of this is that the middle chunk of the movie, which has to draw most of the connective tissue between the mystery of the opening half-hour (Margo is not even slightly sketched personality-wise until after she’s gone) and the resolution of the concluding half-hour, carries less psychological implication and makes the final reveal acquit itself in a much more genial way.

The detective character, source of the most evocative and grounding material in the book, is almost completely absent from the film save for his initial scene and serving his basic function as a character. Most of the movie is concerned with going to a real high-school party, going to prom, becoming comfortable with honesty and pragmatism. The central mystery is mentioned throughout, but only in the later going does it begin to reconnect with and pursue resolution to it.

The Verdict

Both the book and movie here ultimately play in a very low-stakes universe, and that makes both of them more trifling and forgettable than a story about a missing high schooler and questions of sanity and mental health set against the backdrop of senior-year social norms ideally would be. The movie provides lower stakes than the book does by virtue of its backgrounding of the central mystery and character intimacy. It proceeds much more as a shallow high-school comedy, with no real weight or significance except for what the viewer chooses to infer based on their knowledge of the source material. As an attempt to address this, the subtext and theme is jammed in diegetically, toward the end. It works, just barely, but it highlights a core problem with the movie’s narrative: it doesn’t really flow.

We are introduced to Quentin and Margo, given the beginnings of a storyline, and then another one takes over involving different characters and priorities; this is given just enough time to gather some steam before the original story wanders back in to be resolved. The other liability is that the movie, for most of its runtime, has us face-to-face with Nat Wolff’s Quentin - or, more specifically, Nat Wolff’s dead-eyed impersonation of a teenager named Quentin.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5