Movies: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Score:  **** out of ***** (A-)

Long Story Short:  The Perks of Being a Wallflower seems to be slowly working its way through theaters nationwide and is likely to be available on DVD and streaming soon.  It's a coming-of-age film of one year in the life of a high school-aged boy named Charlie.  Ezra Miller shines as one of his pals, and both Lerman and Watson improve along the way, too.  Ultimately, Perks represents the journey of high school faithfully and makes up for any imperfections with its emotional resonance.


It's almost like summer again as the films keep on coming.  This week I got to see The Perks of Being a Wallflower, initially released all the way back in September.  I was interested in seeing it then, but as a limited release it didn't get to my theater; I guess it's expanded since then, so I took the opportunity.  The main draw for me was simply the strength of reviews for it, and I also enjoy the occasional coming-of-age story.  The Perks of Being a Wallflower was directed by Steven Chbosky (who also wrote the novel that it's based on, in 1999) and stars Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Ezra Miller.

We first get a glimpse of the main character, Charlie (Lerman), who is about to enter high school.  He lives in an average suburb with both of his parents and his sister Candace (Dobrev).  Charlie is quiet and intelligent, and at first the only connection he makes is to his English teacher (Rudd).  On a chance encounter at a football game, he sits down with a kid from his shop class, Patrick (Miller) and his stepsister, Sam (Watson), both seniors.  He sees them again at a school dance, and follows them to an after party where they begin to bond.  Charlie, attracted to Sam at first sight, tells her of his lack of romantic experience at Christmas as she expresses some affection, though she is dating someone else.

The trio, plus some of Patrick and Sam's other friends, begin hanging out together all the time, and a favorite activity becomes enacting The Rocky Horror Picture Show at a local theater.  Mary Elizabeth (Whitman) asks Charlie to the Sadie Hawkins dance and, under her controlling lead, the two start to date.  Growing frustrated with the relationship, Charlie acts rashly which threatens his friendship with the entire group.  Meanwhile, spring is approaching with Sam struggling to get accepted into college, Patrick dealing with his own difficult relationship, and Charlie feeling both blessed and cursed by the friends he's made in his first year of high school.

The performances of the young people in a coming-of-age film are crucial to establish relatable, believable events.  Logan Lerman as Charlie is the main character, but he acts more as the center rather than the focus throughout the film.  For the most part he portrays his quiet, polite, intelligent part well, with a few slips in character here are there.  Crucially, he does well in the most important, emotional scenes.  Emma Watson as Sam improves throughout the film after a little overacting at first.  She is well-cast, her strikingly beautiful face attracting Charlie's and the audience's attention; she flirts almost off-handedly, something few can pull off well.  The third member of the group, Ezra Miller as Patrick, is the best, though.  He oozes charisma, and also comes across as the most believable teenager in the entire cast.  Swinging between the extremes of petty pranks to deep pain and alienation, Miller pulls it all off and steals most of the scenes he inhabits.

There are some nice supporting roles, too.  Paul Rudd, typically a leading man, does a fine job in just a few minutes of screentime as the English teacher.  Nina Dobrev as Candace is very convincing as Charlie's sister, trying to keep her little brother at bay at times and at others showing a deep, sisterly bond.  Finally, Mae Whitman injects some good humor into the role of Mary Elizabeth, a smart, sarcastic girl who fluctuates believably between cooly controlling and desperately clinging.

The cast provides the foundation of this realistic coming-of-age film; Perks also contains a story, structure, flow, and feel that makes it all the more relatable.  I mentioned that Charlie acts as the center rather than the focus of the film, and I mean that his are the eyes and ears through which the story is told.  He has a strong family, but aside from his sister, they are virtually ignored - as a real teenager would, focusing instead on his peers.  The foci throughout the film goes in a cycle - again, in the way a teenager's typically does - going from school concerns, to friendship, to romantic pulls, and back again. The structure is also clever:  it takes place over roughly one year, and shows the paradoxical high school feeling of being both temporary and timeless, as Charlie's new friends are all seniors.  There are just enough cultural cues to give the story a place in time, but it's still plenty relatable to most generations, I think.  There are several powerful yet genuine scenes, though not so many that it seems every day has a world-altering one.  Perhaps the most memorable is the most simple, utilizing the power of music, and recurring at the end as a perfect book end.

***

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a flawed film, but one that resonates in ways that elude the efforts of most other films.  The first act of the film had me thinking that it was headed down a very common, very predictable road but then it just kept on developing.  I would argue that the Charlie-Sam relationship is potentially most deserving of criticism:  it takes up the largest chunk of time, sometimes starts to drift into cliche; then it dies down, only to rise up again (better, yet briefer, this time).  I suppose, whether or not this was done intentionally, though, that it well reflects the awkwardness of the whole high school experience.  There are several different important strands of Charlie's relationships in the film, some of which occur simultaneously and others consecutively, and it's interesting to see them all interact and yet stay in their own little bubbles apart from each other.  Although my own high school experience was much different in detail than Charlie's, of course, I could relate to many of his feelings and some of the more powerful moments.  Perks is a movie worth seeing at least once and, like our memories of high school, worth revisiting from time to time.