The Perks of being a Wallflower
Directed and Written by Stephen Chbosky.
Films about young
adults in high school and college are thousands. We can also describe them
sometimes as coming of age films. I say sometimes because many of them don’t
succeed at that point. That’s why I say there are different levels of these
themed films. There are the Scary Movie, American Pie, Accepted, Project X teenage
films, which in resume suck. There’s no depth, people are puppets and you kind
of decide when you want to laugh. I don’t think I need to explain why they aren’t
good films. Then there are reasonable ones. But there are many good
films about these more often than not significant years. It is a special period
and it is a great source material for a lot of unique stories. It is a rich
theme because it is a transitional time in people’s lives that can be extremely
meaningful. In between, there are the ones who stay timeless pieces, classics,
these cult films.
The Perks of Being a
Wallflower is a film that stands out in this genre and when a film like this
one feels timeless it means something really good, at least to me it feels a
little bit timeless. I mean timeless first and foremost because of the story it
is told, because it just grabs the entire meaning of these stories, with
beautiful, emotional and witty sensibility. There are no particular aspects
that stuck this film to a very specific time. This is the story of a very
reserved boy who looks for friendship and comfort in life and what makes this
film transcend to something greater, it’s in the way it is driven. It is in the
way Charlie, Sam and Patrick are taken, these people with strong personalities
of their own, with dimensional reasons to be who they are and why they act the
way they do. It is maybe timeless because it’s able to capture what’s essential
in these moments, to feel, no, I’m not going to say infinite, but just that, to
feel something. Which may be hard sometimes, may be hard to know how. Charlie,
Sam and Patrick may have gone through a lot of learning, a lot of highs and
lows, required and inevitable transitions, no one more particular than the
other, but they have gone through their transition. And this is just one of
many. There’s the transition of high school to college and the decisions that
have to be made. But then in a blink of an eye they’ll be in their twenties and
another transitional time comes and decisions will have to be made again. And
another cycle begins. These periods of times vary deeply, I believe. Not all teenage
lives go through college. High school may not mean anything to some. It’s fair
to remember. But it’s no more or less relevant. Those would be other different
stories. What’s important is that this is a film about friendship.
So I stand for this
film as a liberating one. It is really liberating. You have Patrick, who is
gay, but this is not about a gay teenager, it’s about a really feisty and a good
mood teenager who is not afraid and sometimes rarely is afraid of being who he
is. Charlie is not shy and awkward just to be cute; he is really reserved
because it is the way his personality grew since he was a kid due to whatever
particular circumstances. The same goes for Sam, who is not just the cute girl
who makes other boys fall for her; she has her own obstacles to overcome. It
seems a simple direction, doesn’t it? So is that all it takes for a film to be
a better film? And yet, it is only so hard to achieve it. And yet this film
stands out as one of the rare good ones. No one’s perfect, no one is a puppet. And
therefore, you are able to be connected to these people, to their lives, to
these misfit toys. Logan, Watson and Ezra Miller are wonderful in this film,
what an unlike set of attractive and cool performances. It feels great when you
can sense that they’re in control of the story they’re living in. Ezra Miller
is a scene stealer, but not in a hardcore way! The film direction brings this
unpretentious, quite subtle but right tone to the film. And it feels like a pretty
consistent tone.
I think The Perks of
Being a Wallflower is one of my favorite films of the season.
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