I AM NOT THE PERSON you want to sit next to during the Harry Potter movies. Or The Hunger Games. Or any other adaptation of a wildly popular book. I just sit there, jabbing the ribs of whoever’s unfortunate enough to sit next to me, whispering about what’s different. So after I read—and completely fell in love with—The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I dreaded seeing the movie. I didn’t think I could stomach any changes to such a sweet, sad, and triumphant story. But guess what? This movie totally worked! I still can’t believe it.
For the uninitiated (WHY ARE YOU UNINITIATED, YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK), Perks is about a teenage outcast, Charlie (Logan Lerman), in his first year of high school. His only friend has just killed himself, he dearly misses an aunt who died several years before that, and he pours his heart into letters to a person he’s never met. Charlie has the great fortune to befriend stepsiblings Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller) and their band of punk-rock theater nerds who help him have fun and deal with some serious shit.
Author Stephen Chbosky had the incredible foresight not to option Perks to the Hollywood machine: He sat on those valuable rights for the last 13 years, tinkering with the screenplay himself, until he could eventually put out the movie he wanted for the fans he valued. He directed the film, too. I recently got to speak with Chbosky, and while part of me wanted to seem cool and professional, a bigger part of me—the fan part, the part that won out—just wanted to know why he cut the stuff he cut. Chbosky patiently explained, “I think there are certain people who loved the book who will see the movie who really will wish I’d put in this scene or that scene, but I can assure anybody who loved the book that if anything’s left out, it’s left out for a reason, and it was my doing. All I wanted was for people at the end of the movie to feel that sense of catharsis, the way they did in the book.” It would have been an unsatisfactory response, if Chbosky hadn’t succeeded in doing just that.
In addition to some ace adapting by Chbosky, the kids in this movie play a huge hand in making it great. Lerman’s Charlie is as uncomfortable and sweet as I wanted him to be. Miller’s Patrick took me a few minutes to understand—he was more out there than book-Patrick—but eventually I came around. But it was Watson’s turn as Sam that’s the most interesting. There was potential for it to be way too distracting to see somebody from Hogwarts with an American accent in early ’90s Pittsburgh, but thankfully, she gives Sam a sweet vulnerability that Hermione never had. Chbosky told me one of his favorite moments from the movie was watching her transformation in a scene that takes place in a tunnel. “It was like she entered the tunnel as Emma Watson and she left the tunnel as Sam…. [Watson] never got to be a kid kid,” Chbosky said. “And what I saw on her face in that moment was someone who was absolutely free. Who got to be a kid.” Yeah. It’s pretty great.
Fangirling aside, if you haven’t read the book, you’ve been to high school, so you’re gonna relate to this film. The cathartic Perks captures the sometimes-awesome/always-awkward pains and victories of American teenagerdom in a way that few movies do. Get ready for some flashbacks.
For Elinor’s full, giddy interview with writer/director Stephen Chbosky, go here.
Logan Lerman looks like a young Paul Rudd. And they are both Jewish. Too bad Rudd is not playing Lerman’s father in this film.
Okay, I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I read the book when I was a teenager over a decade ago. And yes, it was great, but can we please, for the intellectual sanctity of womanhood, move on from apotheosizing this young adult genre? Are there any women in this town who read real literature written for adults? I’ve read all these kiddy books for the sake of maintaining conversation beyond hollow exchanges of “That’s a cute skirt,” or “Where do you get your hair done?” and I always come out on Team Jacob or Team Gale, left in the lonely dust of yearning for something real. And dudes, here’s where you come in: Is there a single one of you in Portland with enough cowboy in your bones to back up that beard on your face? Fuck it, I’m in the wrong place–which way to the personal ads? I want to post pictures of my pet to go on a date with a guy who tries to teach me how to play pool even though he doesn’t know the first thing about barroom etiquette and he holds his cue stick with an open bridge.
@Katie This is the most interesting comment I’ve ever gotten in response to something I’ve written for the merc. Thank you, and I hope you get a nice date.
-elinor jones
Ms. Jones, it’s always a relief to be interesting. The date was already bad. I figured he might catch on when I began reading The Mercury but instead he continued buying us rounds of scotch so I stayed on until they closed the bar. I hope you took no offense to my comment; your review swam atop all that laphroaig the whole walk home, sloshing in my brain. I was still holding onto…what? Anger? Disappointment? Really I just didn’t want to cry yet. And buoyed on my sea of booze was something familiar, something to grab at. So I opened my laptop, and, well… Thank you for being gracious about my emotionally displaced, scatter-gun approach to venting. It was a well written review and I now look forward to the movie.
-Katie