Film review: Paper Towns - Lost and found in adaptation

Paper Towns lives up to the standards of a typical coming-of-age story

As young adults flock to the cinema to get their latest dose of teenage romance, older audiences seem less enthusiastic about the latest 20^th Century Fox production. Adapted by The Fault in Our Stars screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber from the Edgar Award-winning best young adult mystery novel of 2008, Paper Towns hinges on the lifelong fascination that smart-bordering-on-nerdy Quentin nurses for his across-the-street neighbour Margo. Best friends and partners in crime as young kids, the two grew apart after Margo became hot and popular. So it comes as a surprise to Quentin when Margo shows up in his bedroom late one night shortly before the end of the school year and dares him to take her out in his parents’ car. She doesn’t specify the reasons, but breaks down his wimpy resistance by merely saying, “Basically, this is going to be the best night of your life.”

Margo’s agenda is to extract revenge on her ‘friends’, which she does, with some help from an initially reluctant Q (as he is known). After Margo has exacted sufficient humiliation and discomfort on her enemies, she and Q end up in a high-rise looking down on Orlando at night.

After giving Q the gift of the best night of his life and a few pearls of teenage wisdom, Margo disappears. Completely. She doesn’t show up at school for days, she’s left home. No one knows what to think. While Q’s friends Ben and Radar count the days till graduation and mull over prom night, Q is fixated on the idea that Margo has left hidden clues about her whereabouts. He thus begins piecing the bits together and sharing them with his patient but skeptical friends.

Despite the flimsy evidence, Q manages to convince his pals they should drop everything and join him on a drive all the way to New York, where he is certain Margo’s hiding in a true “paper town” (a term for nonexistent communities created by cartographers to thwart plagiarisers). Eventually, Ben, Lacey, Radar and Angela all agree to pile into a minivan for the trek. There is just one catch: they have to return in time for prom. By the end, nearly all the story’s hanging questions, mysteries and dilemmas are neatly tied up, with just the right amount of melancholy and maturity added to the mix.

If you’re expecting the waterworks that were unleashed by The Fault in Our Stars, you may be a just a little disappointed as the movie is based more on sense of adventure than on sentiment. The storyline may be farfetched, not unlike most coming-of-age productions, but the acting and execution still makes it mesmerising for teenagers and adults alike.



Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, August 9^th, 2015.