If we don’t believe in the mythology of Margo, and thus can’t empathise with Q’s infatuation with her, then there is no reason for the viewer to get into the car in search of a girl we’re all too aware doesn’t actually exist. It’s when you realise this that the whole film threatens to fall apart. She is the kind of person who would randomly capitalise letters in the middle of a word, and has a tendency to speak in riddles and faux-poetic soundbites – she has none of the allure or enigmatic quality required to make a character like this work for the audience. Taking it upon himself to find her before their senior prom, Q and his friends embark on an adventure to track her down.īut she can’t pull it off.
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One night she arrives at his window and asks him to help with a series of revenge pranks on her ex-boyfriend and various other members of the It-crowd and, the next day, she is missing. Margo (Cara Delevingne) is Quentin’s (Nat Wolff) aforementioned dream girl, a childhood friend who he reluctantly fell out of contact with when she became popular in high school. It does neither of those things, despite a lot of effort on both counts, and what is left over is sadly never substantial enough to justify the movie. Paper Towns wants to be the deconstruction of the teen drama, and has been applauded in some corners for subverting the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.
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We romanticise things to the point where they’re unrecognisable from what they really are, and in doing so we miss the true, genuine things in front of our faces. That’s the platitude that Paper Towns – an adaptation of John Green’s novel of the same name, directed by Jake Schreier – decides to go with.