I never read the actual book The Perks of Being a Wallflower but I have to assume that it's a hell of a lot better than its film adaptation. Not only is it heralded as being one of the better coming-of-age novels of recent memory, it has also been highly recommended to me to read by many people. I may be giving the novel a bit of an unfair advantage, but the movie was just so blasé that there's no way the book was worse.
The film stars Logan Lerman as Charlie, which if you don't remember his name in the first two minutes of the movie, by God will you know it by the end. There is a horrible knack of each character saying Charlie's name every four and a half seconds. Charlie is a troubled fifteen-year-old just entering high school as a freshman. He has no friends on account of his best friend taking a gun to his head six months prior. He soon meets seniors Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson) a less-than-quirky version of the outcast bff's from Mean Girls. They form the unlikeliest of likely bonds. During the school year, Charlie falls for Sam (obviously) which is creepy considering the age difference in a high school senior dating a freshman.
While the movie was written and directed by the same writer who penned the novel (Stephen Chbosky), I still feel like a lot of liberties were taken. The novel was written as a series of letters written by Charlie to an unknown person giving detailed accounts of his first year in high school. And though this is actually a pretty ingenious writing format for the novel, it doesn't necessarily translate that smoothly to film. There are sporadic voice-overs of Charlie reading his letters, but they always seem a bit jarring and out of place. It's as if Chbosky wanted to incorporate the structure of the novel into his film, however, the end result just kind of flatlines.
This isn't the only problem I had with the film, either. While this is supposed to be a coming-of-age tale, I feel as though the 1980s John Hughes movies are leaps and bounds above what this movie was trying to accomplish. Charlie is a troubled kid with repressed memories of his past and fits of blacking out, yet Lerman is a decent looking kid. He's attractive, well-spoken and essentially the exact opposite of the type of "wallflower" I assume the book describes. Emma Watson, using her best attempt at an American accent is terrible in the film. While I personally don't think she is a bad actress, it was hard for me to accept the fact that she was the perfect person to fit the role.
I think my biggest issue with the film, though, is the dialogue. For once I would actually like to watch a "coming-of-age" high school movie with real issues that real people can relate to. I want high school kids to speak like high school kids not like a forty-something writer with existential and philosophical agendasncies. I don't think many high school students have that defining moment of adolescence whilst standing in the bed of a truck listening to an unknown song and feeling "infinite". The high school characters in the film are too abstruse and recondite to have any sort of lasting affect on viewers of the same age. The Breakfast Club or even Mean Girls itself has more to say to today's kids than this movie ever could.
In the film, Charlie forms a bond with his freshman English teacher, played by Paul Rudd. While I'm sure (at least I hope) in the novel their relationship is more fleshed out and powerful, here it feels like a waste of time. We get intermittent scenes of Rudd giving Charlie different books to read and giving him generalized advice on love, but also having no major impact on the story of the film. I think what has happened here is that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an unfilmable book and should never have been attempted to be translated into film. While the movie isn't a total disaster, and there are good moments and bits of humor sprinkled throughout, for those who have not read it, myself included, should probably have just stayed home and enjoyed it the way it was meant to be enjoyed-- in paperback.
D+
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