By Brittany Lauro
Media Credit: MCT Campus
Co Editor-in-Chief
Warning: Spoiler Alert !
Before you sort The Perks of Being a Wallflower into that mental filing cabinet under “another quintessential high school movie”, you might want to think again. While the movie does feature characters in their day-to-day high school lives, there are certainly no painstakingly choreographed dance numbers, sparkling vampires or “plastics” who only wear pink on Wednesdays. The plot, much like the emotions it elicits, are anything but quintessential.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, released in theaters on September 21, is quite possibly the must-see movie of the entire year. Written and directed by Stephen Chbosky, the movie does an overwhelmingly fantastic job of transporting its viewers, whether they are ages16 or 46, back to the woes of high school life where nothing is black and white and everything seems like the hardest thing you’ll ever face.
The film opens with a voice-over from every Perks-lover’s favorite wallflower, Charlie (Logan Lerman), reciting the heart-wrenching first line of the novel – “I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”
Safe to say it took a mere 15 seconds for me to become a prisoner to the screen.
The entire film follows suit, dropping these mind-altering quotes upon its audience; the ones that make you stop and think about the way you’ve been viewing life thus far and perhaps that’s the point of the film. After all, “even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”
For those not familiar with the storyline, Charlie has missed a year of school due to a hospital visit, which isn’t explained in the film but those familiar with the novel know the hospital was a mental institution. He’s uncomfortably shy, reserved, and you really can’t help but feel bad for him, wishing you could climb through the screen and yell, “Charlie, let me love you!”
Things start to turn around for our wallflower when he befriends Patrick (Ezra Miller), a flamboyant senior in his freshman shop class. Patrick introduces him to his stepsister Sam (Emma Watson), and the two take Charlie under their eccentric wings and initiate him into their group of friends (described by Sam as “misfit toys”).
The two become Charlie’s guide, leading him into a life of exhilaration and out of a life where he can’t escape the horrific flashbacks and troubling memories that haunt him. There’s a darkness that follows Charlie even in his happiest moments, and by the end of the film you feel it following you too.
Chbosky takes the audience through some of the lowest lows—rape, suicide, heartache, physical and mental abuse—but he also takes you to some of the highest highs and by the end of the film you are left thinking “I feel infinite”.
The characters are refreshing, the music is eclectic and the moments are fleeting but mesmerizing.
