OVP: Wonder (2017)

Film: Wonder (2017)
Stars: Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Izabela Vidovic, Noah Jupe, Danielle Rose Russell
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup & Hairstyling)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

In 2012, I remember being in a dingy dollar theater and having my world shook.  The Perks of Being a Wallflower had not been a movie I'd anticipated liking.  The only reason I saw it, in fact, was its stray WGA nomination, and I felt like I needed to catch it or risk not having seen all of the Top 8 Oscar nominees come Oscar morning (I like to be as complete as possible by that day).  By the end of the movie, I was a sobbing, emotional mess, startled by how much I adored the picture, and just four weeks later would give it my personal Best Picture, Director, and Lead Actor trophies.  I loved it so much that I felt I must catch Chbosky's follow-up, even though I still had my doubts.  After all, this wasn't his own words in a movie-this wasn't a story that he knew by heart, but instead was a book by RJ Palacio.  Could he somehow find a similar magic?

(Spoilers Ahead) Thankfully for me (and for audiences everywhere-this has the feel of a serious word-of-mouth hit this year), Chbosky was able to find a humanity even in words he didn't know from creation.  The film, centered around a middle-school boy named Auggie (Tremblay) who suffers from Treacher Collins syndrome, is a beautiful and moving tale of the human spirit.  We follow him as he learns to accept himself and his situation in life, making friends for the first time, and we also smartly look away from Auggie to those in the world around him, getting a more human perspective of side characters than we'd normally get in such a film.

This is where the actual magic of Wonder takes place.  Though it does have group sequences, it is broken out into side chapters with these different characters, not just Auggie but his sister Via (Vidovic), his best friend Jack Will (Jupe), and his sister's former best friend Miranda (Russell).  While Tremblay is very good in the central role, Auggie is always going to demand your attention, for the good or the bad, but watching these side characters, you get a sense of how we don't really know what happens in the minds of the people around us.  We see Jack Will, for example, struggle with his need to be included and his self-consciousness about being a scholarship kid, while also really liking Auggie as a person even though it makes him something of a pariah.  We see Via become uncomfortable with how neglected she feels with her parents' adoration of Auggie, even though she knows that he has a harder surface-level lot in life than she does.  And perhaps most effectively, we see Miranda, a character with a broken home who desperately wants to have her best friend's loving family, to the point where she lies at camp and pretends that she's Via.  Chbosky finds the same sense of daring honesty in Palacio's pages as he did in his own, showing us not good or bad people, but people with faults who occasionally must confront them.  Watching Jack Will struggle in vain, for example, to undo his cruelty to Auggie was startling and a lot rawer than you'd typically expect from a family movie.

It must be said that the movie isn't quite as good as Perks.  The parents, though funny and charming (Wilson and Roberts rely heavily on what made them movie stars to begin with), are too idealistic and not really complete performances.  You truly wish that, perhaps in an epilogue, they would have followed their chapters to see what their insecurities and lives were like.  Instead, we are given a schmaltzy ending that undoes all of the previous chapters and the way that they gave a less sugar-coated version of life, showing that even when it's unfair there's wonder in the world.  Having Auggie win a medal with everyone, including his bully for most of the film, thunderously applauding feels like a flight too-far into fantasy.  But up until that point, the movie is one of the best films about the high school experience I've seen since Perks, and well worth your time.

Those are my thoughts on this delightful (I loved it, even if I can see the seams-it's a far better movie than The Blind Side to which it is being compared), and genuinely think I'll be seeing it again.  I can't quite go to five stars here, mostly because the ending doesn't work well and there are too many moments that feel a bit opaque, but it's easily one of the best times I have had in a theater this year, and I suspect it could grow into a five-star "heart" movie, even if I have to stick with it being a four-star "head" movie.  Share your thoughts on the picture below!