The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) is a movie I liked but didn't love - and damned if I didn't want to love it! Intelligent, well-acted, appealing, the movie somehow never really wedged into my my hall of Great Adolescent Movies.
The movie is a rare thing: an adaptation of a novelist's work (a much-liked, trim 1999 epistolary novel) byt the novelist himself - Stephen Chbosky - who also directed it! The time period is never specified, but we're in Pittsburgh, sometime around 1991 or 1992.
Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson) is Charlie, a shy kid who starts high school without any friends and with some sort of unspecified back story - time in a psychiatric hospital, perhaps? Unable to communicate with his parents (Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh, both wasted), he recedes into the background until he comes across come other decide misfits - "uncool" kids who welcome him into their tight-knit, cozy, free-thinking kids: lovely Sam (Emma Watson, with a spot-on American accent), her gay stepbrother Patrick (Ezra Miller, who steals the show) chief among them. It's here, in this warm, offbeat delineation of the collective, familial spirit of the outsiders that the film really shines. Chbosky obviously has great affection for the afterthought kids, and he does fine job etching out three-dimensional characters that fell fresh - extending his touch to Mae Whitman's Mary Elizabeth.
Paul Rudd gives a likable, recognizable supporting performance as Charlie's benevolent English teacher (who assigns Charlie various books to read, from A Separate Peace to The Catcher in the Rye). The film is flawed, though. Like too many "period" pieces, the film OD's on its obtrusive, never-ending use of music. And there just isn't enough story; the film, though it is structured over the course of a school year, sort of meanders along with various details omitted or unclear (where exactly are Sam and Patrick's parents?). Charlie isn't the most compelling character to anchor a movie, but I think it was strange - and perhaps in bad taste - to saddle him with that out-of-nowhere, unnecessary final-act revelation.
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