critical review on movie wonder
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“Wonder,” is a brainy 10-year-old boy with a sweet high voice and a congenital facial deformity, whom numerous corrective surgeries have left looking like a cherub after a car accident. His left eye tugs downward as if a teardrop were falling from it; his ears are bulbs of flesh, and his face is framed by a pinkish ring of scar tissue. That said, he’s not the Phantom of the Opera. He’s just an ordinary kid whose looks take a bit of getting used to.
Auggie is a science geek who loves “Star Wars” and Minecraft, ice cream and X-Box sports games; he’s fueled by all-American fantasies of going to outer space. (He likes to walk around in a toy astronaut helmet that conceals him and feeds his dreams.) His face, which looks youthful and old at the same time, is jarring the first time you see it, but the more you take in his innocent if slightly askew elfin features, the more his soul shines through. Any thoughts that he’s ugly, or odd, are really in the eye of the beholder.
“Wonder” is a movie that belongs in their company. It’s a very tasteful heart-tugger — a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace, and has something touching and resonant to say about the current climate of American bullying. At the same time, the film never upsets the apple cart of conventionality. “Wonder” is an honest feel-good movie, but it lacks the pricklier edges of art.
This is the third feature directed by Chbosky, the novelist who actually got his start as a filmmaker (with the 1995 indie “The Four Corners of Nowhere”), and it was his second, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012), that established him as a major directorial voice. Adapted from his own first novel, “Perks” was the most remarkable coming-of-age movie in years, a drama that took in, with astonishing authenticity, the pleasures and perils of teenage life. (It also used David Bowie’s “Heroes” in a way that’s so transporting it trumps every musical sequence in “Baby Driver.”) “Wonder” is a movie by the same sharp-eyed, open-hearted, close-to-the-ground filmmaker. Chbosky, working in the tradition of Jonathan Demme, doesn’t hype what he shows you, and he cuts to the humanity of everyone on screen, even those who act badly. (He has a touching refusal to demonize.)
“Wonder,” adapted from R.J. Palacio’s 2012 novel (which took its title from the 1995 Natalie Merchant song about overcoming disfigurement), is a less audacious film than “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” But Chbosky’s intense understanding of the layered personalities of kids is a rare gift. He lets the movie breathe by refusing to restrict the drama to Auggie’s point of view. It’s built around his gentle sadness and yearning, but it opens up into chapters told from the vantage of Jack (Noah Jupe), his science-class partner, who looks like he might be turning into Auggie’s buddy, only to leave him with a sense that he can’t trust anyone; and Auggie’s high-school sister, Via (Izabela Vidoovic), who’s the most complicated character in the movie. She has grown up in a family so organized around Auggie that her own needs can never come first. She wouldn’t think to question that, but the dynamic has graced her with both compassion and a hidden wound, and Vidovic’s pensive presence lends her scenes a rapt center of gravity.
“Wonder,” as effective as it is, is a movie in which everything has a way of working out with tidy benevolence. Via goes from being shunned by her best friend (Danielle Rose Russell), who has joined a hipper clique, to falling for a charismatic kid (Nadji Jeter) from the drama club to trying out for a student production of “Our Town” to winning her friend back to becoming the understudy who knocks ’em dead on opening night. Auggie, over the course of fifth grade, goes from being the school goat to a school hero. Yet Jacob Tremblay, acting from behind his transformative make-up, roots that journey in something real: the fact that who you are, whether you look like Auggie Pullman or someone more “normal,” can be a prison or a liberation, depending on the path you choose. Of all the films this year with “wonder” in the title (“Wonderstruck,” “Wonder Woman,” “Wonder Wheel,” “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women”), this is the one that comes closest to living up to the emotional alchemy of that word.