So I watched this movie two Friday movie nights ago, but then, you know, life, and now I'm finally getting around to it. Fun!
The Perks of Being a Wallflower tells the story of a group of friends, but really, just three friends. We first meet Charlie as he's about to embark on his freshman year of high school. He's nervous, because all kids are nervous, but also because he's kind of a loner with no friends. And he has some hinted-at psychological issues that has his parents and siblings occasionally addressing him like he might combust.
In his shop class, he meets Patrick, an outgoing senior, and Patrick introduces him to Sam, Patrick's best friend/stepsister. The three hang out at a football game, and then a dance, and then a party, where Charlie inadvertently eats some pot brownies and opens up to Sam: his best and only friend killed himself the previous summer. Patrick and Sam and their group of misfit friends adopt Charlie into their circle.
Interspersed with happy events from the present are hints at dark moments from each of their paths. Patrick is open about his sexuality, but his boyfriend Brad, a big-shot football player, is not. Brad professes his love of Patrick in private, but when his teammates tease Patrick at school, he says nothing. Sam spent her own freshman year sleeping around with upperclassmen, a result of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child from her father's boss. And in addition to his dead friend, Charlie has even more skeletons in his closet.
Still, things go swimmingly for awhile. Until Charlie realizes he has the hots for Sam right around the same time as another girl in their group, Mary Elizabeth, decides she has the hots for Charlie. One Sadie Hawkins Dance later, he has a girlfriend he doesn't really like and the way he ends the relationship is epic. On the outs with his new and only friends, Charlie begins to deteriorate.
It goes on from there. The movie is a clever pairing of happy-go-lucky coming of age high school story (Speeding through a tunnel! The power of music! First kisses!) with the darkness of reality. We all have our secrets - the outcasts, no matter how outgoing, as well as the perceived "popular" kids (see: Brad; Charlie's sister in an abusive relationship). The final message, though, is one of perseverance and overcoming even the darkest of days, and unlike a lot of teen movies, getting in a petty fight with your friends is NOT the darkest of days.
I wish I had read the book, and I probably still will at some point, but the fact that the book's author directed the film strikes me as a good sign that it's pretty loyal to the story. I didn't recognize many of the actors (I know Charlie was the kid in the Percy Jackson movies and Patrick was the boy in We Need to Talk About Kevin but I haven't seen any of those), and those I did recognize were very different from than their traditional roles. As Sam, Emma Watson was very much not Hermoine Granger; Paul Rudd was almost unrecognizable from his goofy self as Charlie's supportive English teacher. And since the last things I've seen Dylan McDermott in were the first two seasons of American Horror Story, I'm just glad I got through this without an image of him doing something that burns into my brain (pleasuring himself, breastfeeding, you know, the norm).
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