Normally, I wouldn’t think of something like The Perks of Being a Wallflower as my sort of movie. It’s a high school coming-of-age drama. Those can be well done and all, but it isn’t the sort of movie I would generally seek out. Besides, while I do generally find Emma Watson charming and I have no issue with Logan Lerman, Ezra Miller’s recent escapades have made them a bit…problematic. It is on my Fill-in Filmography and all, but if it wasn’t leaving HBO Max by the end of the month, I probably wouldn’t have rushed out to see it all that quickly.

Then I learned the movie does something clever to reframe how some plot elements work, and when that’s done well, I tend to like things more. Plus, have you seen that cast? I’ll save the departing horror movies on HBO Max for later in the month and get this one done now and see if the reconfiguration works.

Charlie Kelmeckis (Lerman) is a sensitive teenage boy starting high school. The youngest of three, he is an big time introvert with some dreams of being a professional writer. For the most part, he’d just assume hide away from the world and let things pass him by. However, there’s a senior in shop class, Patrick Stewart (Miller) who seems to take a liking to Charlie. Likewise, Charlie finds himself smitten with Patrick’s stepsister Sam (Watson). Patrick and Sam are part of a more artistic group of seniors, called the Wallflowers, and Charlie is invited to spend time with them, during which he finds acceptance, tries marijuana, and even gets a girlfriend he would rather not be dating.

At first glance, Charlie does appear to be something of a standard shy kid coming out of his shell thanks to some older and more experienced friends, and in many ways, he is. He has an English teacher (Paul Rudd) that is pushing him to become the writer he wants to be, and his friends are supportive most of the time (as long as he doesn’t commit a major faux pas since it is still high school). Yeah, I didn’t find Charlie’s friends to be anywhere near as deep as they thought they were, but that does fit in with how deep the average high school student actually is. But Charlie has these blackouts, and he haunted by the sudden death of a favorite aunt who died in a car accident on Charlie’s seventh birthday. Charlie, see, has a reason for being the way he is, and even he doesn’t seem to realize it.

OK, I was not expecting this one. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would. Stephen Chbosky wrote and directed the movie, based on his own novel, and while the kids weren’t all that deep, the movie did represent to my mind a certain sort of high school student well. Charlie’s concerns, for the most part, are the concerns of any 14 year old kid in a new school trying to keep his head down. But the story moves in a way that hints at something bigger before the actual full revelation comes out, and the way the movie does so is in such a devastating manner that explains a whole lot while, yes, effectively recontextualizing the entire movie’s backstory.

Besides, this movie had an unbelievably stacked cast. Beyond Lerman, Watson, Miller, and Rudd, there was also Mae Whitman, Kate Walsh, Dylan McDermott, Joan Cusack, Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, make-up artist Tom Savini in a rare non-horror roll, and for just about thirty seconds, Ozark‘s Julia Garner. Chbosky doesn’t have a particularly long resume, and much of it doesn’t really impress me–he apparently directed last year’s Dear Evan Hansen–but he did manage to hit the ball out of the park this time. Maybe not every movie on my Fill-in Filmography poster should be on there, but I think I know why this one is.

Grade: A


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