Emma Watson and Logan Lerman play very attractive people who have lots of super-serious high school problems in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an epic poem of demeaning, highfalutin BS. In an attempt to sympathize with the thinkers, dreamers and helpless romantics, he ends up throwing them all a pity party, glibly explaining their precious pursuits as petty figments of aftershock. In Chbosky’s world, we must be hindered by serious personal trauma in order to trudge forward through a life of stupid, hollow counterculture.
And love? Chbosky takes relationships, both platonic and affectionate, and sucks the realism from them until they’re bone-dry slabs of unbridled idealism. In the worldview of Perks, adolescent love is the greatest thing we can aspire to, and if we don’t achieve it, then we should just wallow in solitude or melt away.
Adapted from the novel of the same name, Perks (directed and written by original author Chbosky) tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman, The Three Musketeers), who feels alienated from the physical world during the beginning of ninth grade. However, it doesn’t take long for him to find friends in step-siblings Sam (the lovely Emma Watson, My Week With Marilyn) and Patrick (Ezra Miller, We Need to Talk About Kevin), who share his passion for art, literature and music. Unlike our main character, though, Sam and Patrick are boisterous socialites with a small but close-knit circle of nonconformists.
The disparity among the three makes their blossoming relationship all the more unbelievable. Sam and Patrick are extroverts with no issue exposing their eccentricities in a hostile high school environment, we discover in a wonderful little scene in which the duo performs a series of choreographed dance moves to “Come On Eileen” at a class formal. Charlie, in contrast, is a pensive introvert, and in this very scene we find him slumped against the gymnasium wall, taken aback by Sam and Patrick’s unapologetic nature.
Later in the film, Charlie falls for Sam, chronicled through lots of great, relevant music. But instead of using songs for genuine expressiveness and creative connections to the story, Chbosky uses them superficially. For instance, we don’t know why Charlie loves “Asleep” by The Smiths, but we do know that it exists on a mixtape he made for Sam.
The same can be said about literature featured in the film, which is given to Charlie by his English teacher, Bill (the underused Paul Rudd, Wanderlust). Once again, we don’t know why Bill introduces him to Fitzgerald and Kerouac, but we know it predominantly fuels their friendship that is, unfortunately, never fleshed out.
By the end of the movie, we learn that Charlie’s childhood was shaped by an abusive, sexual relationship with his Aunt Helen (Melanie Lynskey, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World). Here Chbosky commits an ultimate, fatal error: expressing the human impulses of a character, which seem noble and real and relatable to the audience, as inanimate stems of prior distress. Whether or not Charlie ends up with Sam, follows his passion for writing, or truly finds endless gratification in sitting alone listening to The Smiths is beside the point. Chbosky has already decided that his fate is governed by the inorganic slings and arrows of the banal past.
So, in that case: Thanks for the commiseration ceremony. The “infinite” tastes all the more sweet now that I know it was predetermined.
essner@umdbk.com
