“Paper Towns” Is A Crap-Crossed Love Story

Audiences get quite a bargain when buying a ticket for Jake Schreier’s new YA lit adaptation Paper Towns. These lucky viewers will see two movies for the price of one. At a run time of approximately 105 minutes, the first is an insufferably pseudo-quirky recitation of the most nauseating teen date-movie clichés, one of those films in which a whimsical and fearsomely good-looking young woman (back in the day, a friend of mine came up with a handy term for this weirdly recurrent phenomenon) exists solely to push a megabland everydude to seize the wonder and excitement of common life. The second film attempts to subvert the first by acknowledging all of the elements that made it hacky and tiresome, and mostly does so successfully. But the road through Paper Towns is long and arduous, and though its endpoint lands in positive territory, surely there’s a less unpleasant route to get there.

In its final minutes, the film outs itself as a deconstructive satire, or maybe more like a feature-length prank, having conned viewers into sitting through one of the most groanworthy casseroles of high-school sentimentality in recent memory only to reveal that they were in on the joke the whole time. By the time the credits roll, Paper Towns’ objective has become abundantly clear. What the filmmakers (and the source material’s author, YouTube personality John Green) fail to realize is that the methods they employ to expose the hollow artifice of many teen romances still put audiences through a lot of trouble. Up until the film’s climax, it shows no signs of self-awareness or metatextual commentary, just triteness in every direction, like an entertainment-free scrubland. Paper Towns begs a difficult but necessary question: Instead of making a bad movie and then hastily noting the ways in which it is bad, why not simply make a good movie?

The crap-crossed lovers of Paper Towns are Quentin (leaf of legal pad paper Nat Wolff) and Margo (popular eyebrow-haver Cara Delevingne). He’s the sort of skinny, nervous, brown-haired white guy that makes this writer ashamed to be a skinny, nervous, brown-haired white guy. She’s the sort of girl who’s not like the other girls—we know this, because Quentin tells her “you’re different than everyone else.” Despite the fact that her main hobbies include wRitiNg liKe thiS (by her reasoning, the letters in the middle of words don’t get enough attention) and running away from home for no apparent reason other than boredom, Quentin has lusted after her from their childhood as neighbors—yes, Margo is literally the girl next door—up through to high school, in which they’ve fallen into disparate cliques.

One fateful night, all of Quentin’s dreams begin to come true when Margo climbs in his window and charmingly requests that he chauffeur her around as she wreaks juvenile revenge on her cheating ex and his new paramour. It’s a night that young Quentin will never forget, but that’s only the catalyst for the film’s true plot. Margo runs away from home the next day, and this time, she leaves infuriatingly cutesy clues leading Quentin to her location. Her vintage Woody Guthrie album leads him to her vintage book of Walt Whitman poetry which leads him to a vintage abandoned souvenir shop in the “Detroitiest” neighborhood of Orlando! Unfortunately, none of these clues lead him, or us, off of something tall. After deciphering Margo’s location like some kind of shitty Encyclopedia Brown, Quentin and his pals Radar (Justice Smith) and Ben (Austin Abrams) set off with romantic opposites in tow to retrieve Margo from upstate New York in time for prom. Along the way, they confront the adult realities of sex as well as their impending departure to college, and of course, Quentin finds his confidence.

Quentin’s magical reunion with Margo does not quite go as he had anticipated, but by that point, the audience is too filled with seething rage to appreciate the switcheroo of expectations. Paper Towns works better on paper than in practice; its ideas are infinitely preferable to the experience of watching the film. Movie Mezzanine would gladly award a paragraph-long plot summary of Paper Towns, say, 3 to 3-and-a-half stars. But there’s no need to shove our faces in excrement to let us know that it stinks.