Paper Towns

The supermodel turned actress--does she exist, or is she as mythical as the unicorn? Many supermodels have tried acting, most to disastrous results (Cindy Crawford), but they keep plugging away it. The latest is Cara Delevingne, whose work I will be looking at this week.

I suppose the most successful model/actress was Lauren Hutton. Many successful actresses were previously models, like Kim Basinger, but they weren't what is generally known as "supermodels," that is, women who commanded high fees, were on many magazine covers, and were famous for modelling alone. Delevingne certainly qualifies, and she's turned her attention full time to acting.

Her first significant role was in 2015's Paper Towns, a charming if overly precious film based on John Green's novel. She plays Margo Roth Spiegelman, a character that basically only exists in fiction. She's quirky--we know because she randomizes her capitalization.

She is loved from afar by her neighbor, played by Nat Wolff. As small children they were friends, but as high school students he watches her wild exploits while pining. He is a serious student, while she is a will-o-the-wisp who runs with the popular crowd.

One evening she appears at his bedroom window and asks him to accompany her on a series of pranks to get back at her boyfriend, who cheated on her with her best friend. He does, risking arrest, but has a glorious evening, hoping they can have a relationship. But she disappears the next morning. A few days later he realizes she has left clues to her destination, and with his best friends heads out to find her.

The title refers to a practice by map-makers to include fictitious towns on their maps to prove copyright infringement. Agloe, New York, is one of them, and it is used here as Delevingne's hideout. The clue-solving stuff is fun, and the camaraderie among the friends is also well done. I especially enjoyed the performance of Justice Smith as Wolff's serious friend, who says "If there's a tuba there, it's not a party."

The film was directed by Jake Schreier, who mostly makes music videos. It manages to avoid being weighed down by too much sentimentality, but the script makes the mistake of including too much voiceover narration, with passages I'm sure come straight from the book. As I watched the film I imagined it without this narration, and, like most films that do this, it could have been cut entirely, as what we are seeing conveys the same thing as the narration. The film also has me questioning where the kids are getting their money from, or why no one seems to care that they head off to New York (from Orlando) during the school year.

As for Delevingne, she is fine. She gets to disappear halfway through the movie, which makes her character seem for legendary than she is. She does an American accent well enough. During the promotion of the film she did an interview with a morning show crew from Sacramento that asked her inane questions (one of them was had she read the book) and she answered sarcastically, and the idiots on the show put her down after she left the air.