Author Stephen Chbosky has adapted his own novel - itself a weak attempt at a "Catcher in the Rye" for a new generation - into...well, a John Hughes-inspired film for a new generation. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I first read "The Catcher in the Rye" when I was 30. For some reason, it had fallen through the cracks in my reading experiences, and by the time I got around to it, I found it highly overrated. So when I picked up "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" when it first became popular, I found it to be almost a copycat attempt to accomplish what "Catcher" was going for. Needless to say, I wasn't terribly impressed.
Still, I entered into the film with an open mind, and I'm glad I did. I was open to the possibility that the story was better on a movie screen than on pages (hey, it can happen, contrary to the "the book was better than the movie" inevitability). But in the early stages of viewing, I remained troubled by what a nearly 40-year-old man would see, which is a bunch of cliches and get-over-it-already teen angst.
But then, as if a switch went off, I reached a moment in the film where the teenager still lurking somewhere inside of me rose to the surface, and then as if by magic, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" clicked for me, and in truth, I was very moved.
Part of why "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" works - cliches be damned - is because its three leads are so believable and engaging. Logan Lerman is Charlie, the film's central character and its damaged goods (though that argument has competition from a handful of other characters). Charlie, as in the novel, is telling his story through letters that he is writing to an unidentified friend. He tells his friend about how hard it's been to adapt to high school and hints at some rough times in his past that have contributed to keeping him on the fringes at school. And he talks about his two closest friends, both seniors who have taken him under their wings.
Those friends are Sam (Emma Watson, so lovely here that you'll forget about Hermione for a few hours) and Patrick (Ezra Miller, who previously scared the shit of me in "We Need to Talk About Kevin"). It seems odd at first that two seniors would take to a freshman, but they seem to relish in their efforts to expose Charlie to both the goods and bads of their involved adolescent world. Without them, Charlie would likely be locked in his room, curled into the fetal position on his bed. That is, unless you include his admiring interactions with his English teacher (Paul Rudd), who slips Charlie copies of his favorite books to read.
But Charlie gets out, thanks to his friends. He is clearly not always comfortable. He falls in love, hard, with someone he shouldn't love (you can guess who). He's exposed to drinking and recreational drugs. He's made to put his inherent tolerance as an outsider himself to good use upon discovering that one of his close friends is gay. Because I don't want to spoil the way the film weaves these details in to the plot and given that most are already very expected and well-worn paths being explored, I'll just say: "insert teen angst here."
Without tapping in to your inner-teenager, your eyes will probably roll with just how messed up Charlie's life reveals itself to be. I was headed down that road myself. But then upon hearing one of the film's perhaps more obvious lines concerning teenage life, I was thrown into a time machine. That line, spoken by Charlie during an outing with Sam and Patrick, goes like this:
"Right now we are alive and I swear in this moment, we are infinite."
And in that moment, I remembered how it felt to feel like you had your whole life ahead of you - that you were capable of just about anything. And I started to feel crushed for how the mental demons Charlie struggled with were preventing him, at least until that moment, from feeling that sense of wide-open hope. And then I started thinking about students I've had in class who have dealt with such unimaginable, such adult despair that they didn't even feel like kids to me.
And that was where my head needed to be.
Our teenage years are like a hero's quest for true love an acceptance. We don't know yet what it really means to love another person, and we don't know what it means to love ourselves. When Chbosky adapted his own novel to the screenplay he would direct himself, he invariably brought this theme to the surface. It is, even nestled in a pile of teen movie cliches, truth. And like they always say, sometimes cliches are cliches because they are the truth. If "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is a good movie, it is because the film gets these feelings painfully and authentically right. Its moments of humor are organic, and its pain is real. And having worked with teenagers for over a decade, I can say that this is truly a film about teenagers right now.
When Charlie questions his inability to understand love, he is told that "we accept the love we think we deserve," advice he returns to Sam later in the film after wrestling with who she is going to be to him in his life. That one line pretty much sums up the movie, though I will do you a favor and allow you to discover just how that is the case by convincing you that you should check out the film for yourself.
But when you watch it, be a teenager again if you are not one currently. And remind yourself of when you felt like you too were from "the island of misfit toys." Remember how much you wanted for your future and how worried you were about what you were capable of getting. And then remember how the smaller moments - the ones where you were doing something slightly exciting with your very closest friends - were the greatest moments of your life.
★ ★ ★
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