Review: Paper Towns
"It's a paper town. Paper houses and paper streets. And the people too. I've lived here 11 years and I've never come across anyone that cares about anything that matters." Thus spoke Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), the night before she disappears.
Quentin Jacobson (Nat Wolff) has been in love with Margo since she and her family moved in across the street. As kids, they were unlikely friends but drifted apart as they grew older and she became more popular. Margo has always been special, her life a series of epic adventures, each one more unbelievable than the last. So when Margo climbs into his bedroom window one night and asks him to help her "right some wrongs and wrong some rights," Quentin hesitates but jumps at what he believes is his second chance to connect with Margo.
They set off into the night, Margo intent on exacting revenge on her high-school boyfriend, who has been cheating on her with one of her best friends. "We bring rain down on our enemies," she proclaims (Margo is prone to such exclamations when not uttering Yoda-like words of advice) before taking a picture of her naked ex fleeing a house, leaving a dead catfish in her cheating friend's basement, and covering a car in Saran Wrap. Each deed of retribution is marked with a note that features Margo's penchant for random capitalisation.
Viewers may feel otherwise but Quentin is enlivened by her pranks and, more importantly, by sharing the night with his longtime crush. "Will things be different tomorrow?" he wonders when he drops her back home. Yes, Quentin, for tomorrow Margo Roth Spiegelman will vanish without a trace. For all her popularity, very few people seem concerned about her absence. Rumours abound - she's gone off to Iceland, she's signed with a record label, and so on because that is the kind of thing that a girl like Margo Roth Spiegelman would do. Her parents couldn't be more indifferent - Margo has run away many times before, her mother tells the police, she'll come back when she runs out of money or when people stop talking about her.
Quentin, however, believes that Margo wants to be found and, when he discovers what seem to be clues she left behind, that he is the one meant to find her. He enlists the help of his best friends Ben (Austin Abrams) and Radar (Justice Smith) to decode the clues and the trio, along with Radar's girlfriend Angela (Jaz Sinclair) and popular girl Lacey (Halston Sage), set off on a road trip to a real-life paper town where Margo may have put down roots. (The film's title refers to fictional towns mapmakers use to prevent copyright infringement.) For his companions, the road trip is a chance at one last adventure before college life beckons. For Quentin, it's another opportunity to enable his obsession.
Based on John Green's pre-The Fault in Our Stars novel, Paper Towns is part coming-of-age story, part mystery, part road trip, and part riff on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Of course, Quentin isn't chasing Margo but rather his dream of Margo which is to say nothing. That Margo does not exist. Margo exists as mere projection, a paper girl for others to contort to their imaginations. How and what one imagines says much about the person doing the imagining, but what exactly does it reveal about Quentin?
Not much, to be Frank, other than he must truly be blinded by his feelings for Margo to overlook how grating, dismissive, and condescending she can be. Delevingne is filled the brim with natural charisma, but the mystery of Margo is boring at best and pointless at worst. Her whimsy - let me do this just because - feels so forced and guileful that it seems symptomatic of a pre-existing mental imbalance. Margo is the device to immobilise Quentin to live life to the fullest, to find himself by getting lost. Wolff almost makes you believe in his character's dawning realisation that it is "a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person." The rest is plain blarney.
Paper Towns
Directed by: Jake Schreier
Written by: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber; adapted from John Green's novel
Starring: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams, Justice Smith, Jaz Sinclair, Halston Sage, Cara Buono
