The problem is that Margo’s affectation is her depth.
The movie’s title is a reference to a cartographer’s term for a fake place that exists only to catch copycat mapmakers, and a central theme in “Paper Towns” is learning to discern the authentic from the affected and the real from the idealized.
When Margo leads Q on a night of mischief at the expense of some disloyal friends, it shakes Q out of his comfort zone and sends Margo into a spell of self-seriousness, as she stares glumly over the skyline bemoaning her “paper town with paper people.” I can’t blame Delevingne, a model who is transitioning to film acting, for Margo’s troubles as a character - she delivers fortune cookie lines like, “You have to get lost before you find yourself,” with conviction, and her raspy voice and power eyebrows communicate just the right amount of danger for Orlando. When Q and his friends discuss girls over a game console or bond over the singing of a Pokemon song, their Musketeer-like camaraderie is convincing, or at least as much as a PG-13-rated conversation between adolescent males can be.īut when Margo arrives at Q’s window promising, “Basically this is gonna be the best night of your life,” something feels false about her swagger. His band geek friends feel authentic, too: There’s the earnest Radar (Justice Smith), who is too mortified by his family’s massive collection of black Santas to bring home his more mature girlfriend, and the hormonally driven Ben (Austin Abrams), who’s the group’s puckish instigator. Wolff’s portrayal is natural and open, with clenched hands, longing glances and an endearing awareness that he has some growing up to do. Schreier manages to find a believable sense of place in Q’s hometown of upscale suburban Florida, with its tidy yards and sterile office parks, and Neustadter and Weber, who also adapted “A Fault in Our Stars” for director Josh Boone, have a feel for the mundane moments of teen life that carry an emotional punch. Q is the kind of high school senior who dresses up like an iPod and answers the door for trick-or-treaters on Halloween night Margo (Cara Delevingne) is the kind who gets picked up in a red convertible. The far more appealing protagonist of the movie is Margo’s neighbor, Quentin - “Q” to his friends - a loyal band geek played by Nat Wolff who’s in love with her. Unfortunately, in the translation to screen, articulate often becomes pretentious, and Margo’s world weariness is never given a motivation apart from a 30-second scene of her hand-wringing parents. Like another bard of middle-class high school drama, filmmaker John Hughes, Green gives teens credit for having a rich interior life, and that’s a worthy endeavor. Hyper-articulate teens are a specialty of Green’s, and his young adult readers love him for it. But the precocious beauty whose disappearance sets the plot in motion - a myth of a girl named Margo - is the kind of character who actually improves a movie by vanishing.
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