Movie Review - WONDER

MOVIE DETAILS

Directed by                    Stephen Chbosky

Produced by                  David Hoberman

                                       Todd Lieberman

Screenplay by                Jack Thorne

                                       Steve Conrad

                                       Stephen Chbosky

Based on                        Wonder by R.J. Palacio

      

Starring                          Julia Roberts

                                       Owen Wilson

                                       Jacob Tremblay

Music by                        Marcelo Zarvos

                                       Bea Miller

Cinematography            Don Burgess

Edited by                       Mark Livolsi

Production company     Lionsgate[1]

                                       Mandeville Films[1]

                                       Participant Media[1]

                                       Walden Media[1]

                                       TIK Films[1]

Distributed by               Lionsgate

Release date                  November 14, 2017 (Regency Village Theater)

                                       November 17, 2017 (United States)

Running time                 113 minutes[2]

Country                         United States

Language                       English

REVIEW

There’s a treacliness to this manipulative movie – more heartsinker than heartwarmer – about Auggie, a 10-year-old kid with a rare facial disfigurement, played in prosthetic makeup by Jacob Tremblay.

He’s been taught at home by his concerned and caring parents, played by Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson, while successive surgeries partly improved his condition. But this brave boy must now start school, and face down the bullying and staring, without the toy astronaut helmet that he has, until now, always worn outside. Meanwhile, Auggie’s older teen sister Via (Izabela Vidovic) has issues of her own: she is angry and conflicted about her parents neglecting her needs in favour of Auggie’s.

The movie appears very well intentioned, but those good intentions may be as fabricated as everything else here. Certainly Wilson’s performance is horribly fake, phoning it in with the same old halting drawl. He looked a lot more emotionally engaged with his labrador in  than he does with any human being here. And Roberts keeps doing her dying-down-to-a-whisper voice at moments of emotional suffering.

Auggie’s face is undoubtedly shocking at first, though far less challenging than Rocky’s face in Peter Bogdanovich’s comparable 1985 film Mask. And as Auggie is a 10-year-old rather than a teenager, some harder and more adult questions about what his condition means for his emotional life need never be asked. This movie is based on the bestselling 2012 novel by RJ Palacio, although tellingly that book was avowedly based on the author’s experience of seeing a girl with a facial disfigurement. By switching the gender, in a film about the importance of looks, the stakes are marginally but distinctly lowered.

It might have been better as a longform TV drama, like a cross between My So-Called Life and The Wonder Years, and the soapy nature of the story is at first reasonably promising. When Auggie first shows up at school, he is greeted by the kindly, wise, bearded principal (Mandy Patinkin) who has ordered a handpicked group of pupils to show him around. One is Jack, played by Noah Jupe, and another is Julian (Bryce Gheisar). Jack sees past what Auggie looks like and they become friends, though their relationship is not without its trials.

Julian’s job is to be the obviously nasty, sneery bully without whom this story cannot function: the tiny  underlines everyone else’s good faith. It becomes clear, however, that despite the principal having a zero-tolerance attitude towards bullying, the film has a zero-tolerance attitude towards being judgmental: it is soon implied that Julian’s behaviour is actually the fault of his smarmy parents. We finally get a glimpse of Julian, smilingly happy and forgiven, as he joins in with the general acclaim for Auggie’s courage.

As for Via, her best friend Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell) has returned to school from her summer break with a trendy new hairstyle and has apparently dropped her as a friend. Her only ally and confidante was her late grandmother, played in cameo by Sônia Braga, last seen as the music critic in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film . Confused and hurt, Via throws herself into trying out for the school play, where an impossibly cute, hip, sensitive, glasses-wearing boy called Justin (Nadji Jeter) instantly falls for her – her trials are not so bad.

All of these characters, or nearly all of them, are given backstories, heralded by their names in intertitles, sympathetically letting us in to their private lives. (Not Julian though: he gets to be the bully, and that’s it.) But there are no real ironies or complexities and Miranda’s secret emotional journey is outrageously unlikely. It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

                 MORAL MESSAGES

1.            LESSON #1: CHOOSE KINDNESS—

The power here is the difference between the verbs “be” and “choose.”  In Palacio’s book, the line is “when given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.” No offense to the recent Cinderella, the statement “be kind” feels like a mere suggestion of desired behavior when compared to thinking, reflecting, and acting with making actual choices rooted in kindness.  The difference of action is a powerful and purposeful one.  Be a bigger person through small acts.

2.            LESSON #2: THE WRONGNESS OF BULLYING IN ITS MANY FORMS—

The superficiality of people that vainly judge others on looks is an immortal allegory.  Uninformed from sympathy, bluntly honest children can be worse than adults in this department.  Bullying is never right and it deserves to be called out and stopped on every occasion.  Tear that hate away and be a valuable friend instead of a worthless bully. 

3.            LESSON #3: THE DEFINITION OF "WONDER"—

Borrowing from the lede of this website’s review of Wonder Woman, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the noun form of “wonder” as “a cause of astonishment, the quality of excited admiration, or rapt attention at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience.”  To observe the little guy that began hiding inside an astronaut’s helmet strive and thrive towards self-confidence and accomplishment checks off each one of the three prongs of that definition.  If that's not enough, follow what R.J. Palacio did and listen to Natalie Merchant sing about the word.