The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Review)
Michael Scott
Shortly after sitting through and the good-but-not-great romance The Fault in Our Stars, The Perks of Being a Wallflower quickly cropped up in related films while I did research on that one.
I added it to my list, despite my allergy to films that push the hipster agenda.
I watched it, the whole while feeling echoes of the artfully constructed romance of Your Name and the high school realism of movies like The Breakfast Club and Superbad. But unfortunately for Perks, the film doesn't come close to those two, with its main fault being its trainwreck of a narrative and contrived main character.
The film is centered around a high school freshmen Charlie who writes letters to (himself?) someone in order to stave off what we later find out is his deteriorating mental state, but this initially is brushed off as nerves. While attending his first football game he sits next to the heroically gay Patrick and is soon joined by Sam (Emma FRICKEN Watson). These too are part of the outcast cool kids and this is where the hipster attitude is really spat in the audience's faces. It's not quite as bad as say- Heathers, but it's pretty obvious.
Unfortunately, the movie is a straight-up celebration of the social outcast instead of an honest look at them. Turns out, the popular kids aren't all the devil, but this movie would rather you think that. I would've much rather the movie dissected the attitudes of these characters a bit more and amplified the hypocrisy of purposely isolating oneself, instead of brushing that tidbit under the rug. In my experience the hipster kids hate us, cause they ain't us.
Anyway, this is where describing the plot would become a useless exercise as it jumps around so drastically that summarizing it would just become a play-by-play of the scenes that I remember. The ultimate point of the movie is that Charlie develops feelings for Sam and it mostly doesn't work out.
But between these two events, he dates another girl, befriends and forms a strong relationship with an English teacher (Paul Rudd for some reason), does well in a shop class (Tom Savini for SOME REASON), breaks up with the girl he's dating in an unnecessarily cruel way, and then gets in a fight with some bullies.
It's just a cluster of scenes and emotions and most of them don't have a connecting through-line. But it's not a movie that supposed to tell a series of short stories from what I can tell, the movie is supposed to feel like a complete product.
Cheesy lines like "Why do people date the wrong person" and "We are infinite" abound in the film and elicited audible groans from myself, despite being alone in my room when I watched it. It's clearly made for people in high school, and while that's not inherently a bad thing, it has what I like to call the "Stand by Me" effect.
Stand by Me of course being the 1986 coming-of-age movie about some young boys in the late 50s. It's not a bad movie, but the issue I have with the movie is personal. I saw the movie when I was 17 or 18 for the first time and while I enjoyed it from a filmmaking perspective, the emotional weight was wasted on me. I didn't watch it when I was a young boy and therefore couldn't easily empathize with many of the thoughts and issues that were brought up and I also didn't grow up in the 50s. I've been told by a friend of mine, and a big fan of the movie that the film is "timeless" and while this may be true, the issue is that it's not timeless for everyone. Or anyone for that matter.
The enjoyment of movies like Stand by Me and Perks almost entirely depend on the emotionally vulnerability of the viewer and more so the age at which the movie was seen. Perks would've likely had a bigger impact on me had I seen in when I was 16, not 22.
These boys are begging to get their balls sicked.
Spoilers
The twist at the end of the movie is that the reason for Charlie's erratic, and anti-social behavior was due to him having repressed memories of his aunt sexually abusing him as a child. Her swift and unexpected death becomes an anchor point which Charlie begins to hang his failings on until he begins to contemplate suicide at the end of his freshmen year.
Heavy stuff, but this all happens within the last 20 minutes of the two hour movie.
Say What?
The mental stability not withstanding, none of the familial trouble is emphasized in the earlier portions of the movie, instead focusing on his inability to take action such as when he catches his sister being beaten by her boyfriend or when his family is begging he break up with his annoying girlfriend and he instead just internally complains about how awful she is until he decides to humiliate her at a party.
Charlie isn't a bad person, and he's not a bad character. He's just hard to believe. In fact the movie challenged my belief at multiple points in the film. And though it had the occasional moment of insightful clarity, its insistence on emphasizing how cool it is to not be popular and casual glossing over of issues like closeted homosexuality, and drug abuse make it hard to take the film seriously from any perspective other than a purely reflexive and emotional one.
I didn't hate it, it's not terrible, but like a lot of teen movies, you get out what you bring into this movie. Whether or not you identify the with the characters is up to you, not the film. And that makes it particularly difficult to recommend critically.