Cinemazlowski 'Paper Towns' movie review

Jul 27, 2015

Nearly everyone has one huge crush or outright love interest that got away. But what if that person came back into your life one night, and you were single and available, and seemed to be giving you another chance? Would you  take it?

That's the sweeping romantic question that kicks off  the new movie "Paper Towns," the second film based on the books of mega-popular Young Adult fiction writer John Green. Following on the smash hit success of last year's "The Fault In Our Stars" – which depicted the tragic romance of two teens afflicted with cancer, and the grace and hope with which they handled it – the new movie is a lighter, more adventurous and fun road-trip movie.

But it is still resonant enough to give hope that Hollywood has found another teen master like John Hughes ("Pretty in Pink," "The Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") in Green. And any teen film that rises above an obsession with sex, ala the trashy "American Pie" trilogy of adecade ago, is something to commend.

The movie follows a boy nicknamed Q (Nat Wolff), who is shown as a young boy meeting and developing a friendship with a new mysterious girl named Margo (played as a teen by Carla Delavigne). She is always far more adventurous than he is, and when he becomes a study-driven teenager and she stays always in mischief, they grow distant.

Then one night, she climbs in his bedroom window and asks him to sneak out in his parents' car and drive her on a series of  nine pranks in one night. The pranks are built around revenge on her boyfriend for sleeping with her best friend, and their friends who covered up the affair from her.

Against his initial thoughts, but with his youthful feelings for her restoked, Q agrees to help her and they embark on a series of mildly destructive yet comically portrayed pranks. These involve sneaking into their targets' houses and include spray painting "M" for Margo on the wall of each house, but in general they are ridiculous and not serious enough to take great moral outrage over, aside from scaring her old boyfriend into jumping out a window naked from her best friend's house and snapping a picture of him from behind as he runs away.

The night veers nearly into romance by its end, with Margo saying she can't wait to see Q the next day and his assuming they are now going to date. But instead she disappears, leaving a trail of mysterious clues that culminate with her saying she's run off to a "Paper Town"  - a fake town that exists only on a map to protect a map designer's copyright. Margo believes that her hometown of Orlando is also a paper town in its own way – a pretty surface with no true meaning behind it, and her life is a quest for meaning through various adventures.

The rest of the movie becomes a very fun and often moving road trip, as Q and his buddies, plus one of their girlfriends and the girl whose car was Saran wrapped by Margo, all team up to follow clues to go find Margo at her paper town in New York state. Along the way, they wrestle with the fact that they are about to graduate and split off from each other's lives for the first time ever while at college.

Unfortunately, this intriguing mystery involving smart, mostly moral and appealing teens is somewhat weakened by a couple of scenes involving sex talk – with each guy either goading each other to have sex or sharing fake stories of conquests they falsely claim to have already made. This ultimately culminates in one boy and his girlfriend deciding to break their decision to have sex for the first time on prom night, as they have sex while sleeping on the trip overnight, and then the boy smirks and gloats to his friends the next day.

Adults should certainly have no problem handling that content, and certainly shouldn't dismiss "Paper Towns" as a mere flick for teens. Its sweeping sense of comic adventure and romance –  the main couple stays chaste – might awaken the sense of joy and wonder that these young people maintain as they face the transition to college and adult life. And perhaps that's a good reminder of the simple joys and pleasures to be found in life during an age when everything in society seems far too rushed and only looks good on paper.