Stephen Chbosky wrote the novel in 1999 and waited more than a decade to see it on screen, because he would not hand it to anyone who would not let him direct it himself. The Perks of Being a Wallflower arrived in 2012 with Chbosky in both chairs, and the film runs 103 minutes and follows a Pittsburgh freshman year in 1991.
It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2012, to a standing ovation, and Summit Entertainment put it in American theaters on September 21.
Trailer, via The Dollar Theater.
Charlie Writes to an Unnamed Friend
Logan Lerman plays Charlie, a teenager who writes letters to a friend the film never names. The letters carry his freshman year: the shyness, the fear, the slow opening up. Charlie has clinical depression and has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital when the film begins.
He makes one friend at first, his English teacher. Then he meets two seniors, stepsiblings Patrick and Sam, played by Ezra Miller and Emma Watson. After the homecoming dance they bring him to a party, and he walks in on Patrick kissing Brad, the high school quarterback. Patrick tells him Brad is closeted. Charlie keeps the secret.
Charlie tells Sam his best friend killed himself the year before. She realizes he has no one else, and she and Patrick pull him into the group.
The Fort Pitt Tunnel and the Unknown Song
Driving home, the three hear a song on the radio none of them can name. Sam tells Patrick to drive through the Fort Pitt Tunnel so she can stand in the back of the pickup while the music plays. The tagline is “We are infinite.” That scene is where the film earns it.
Sam needs better SAT scores for Penn State, so Charlie tutors her. Her scores improve. At Christmas she gives him a vintage typewriter. They talk about relationships. Charlie says he has never been kissed. Sam says her first kiss came at eleven, from her father’s boss.
Charlie tells her his Aunt Helen was sexually assaulted as a child and learned to move on. Sam says his first kiss should be with someone who loves him, and they kiss, though she has a crush on Craig.
Aunt Helen, the Crash, and the Hospital
At a New Year’s Eve party Charlie takes LSD by accident. The flashbacks take over: Aunt Helen, played by Melanie Lynskey, died in a car crash on her way to buy him a gift for his seventh birthday. He passes out in the snow and wakes in a hospital.
The film does not treat any of this as decoration. Charlie’s post-traumatic stress disorder is the spine of the story, and he does not know he has it. Chbosky lets the audience see what Charlie cannot.
The cast around Lerman is deep:
- Emma Watson as Sam
- Ezra Miller as Patrick
- Mae Whitman as Mary Elizabeth
- Kate Walsh as Mother
- Dylan McDermott as Father
- Melanie Lynskey as Aunt Helen
- Nina Dobrev as Candace
- Johnny Simmons as Brad
- Joan Cusack as Dr. Burton
- Paul Rudd as Mr. Anderson
- Nicholas Braun as Ponytail Derek
Casting moved through 2010 and 2011. Lerman and Watson were in talks by May 2010 and confirmed the next year. Whitman and Dobrev came aboard in April 2011, Rudd later that month. Walsh announced her role on May 9, 2011, and said filming had started. Miller joined on May 19, 2011.
What Holds and What Slips
Principal photography began in Pittsburgh in May 2011 and ran about fifty days. The city is not a backdrop here; it is the ground the film stands on, and the tunnel scene only works because the place is real.
The performances are the reason the film lasts. Lerman carries long stretches without much dialogue, and the role asks him to be watched rather than to perform. Watson gets the harder job, since Sam has to be both the object of Charlie’s attention and a person with her own history, and she manages it. Miller is the film’s live wire, and Patrick’s secret about Brad gives him the one arc that could have turned sentimental. It does not.
Chbosky’s screenplay is the strongest element. He wrote the novel and he wrote the film, and the adaptation keeps the letters as a frame without letting them smother the scenes. The soundtrack does real work too, though the best musical moment is the one where nobody knows the song’s name.
Where the film slips is in its final stretch. The revelations about Aunt Helen arrive fast, and the film leans on them harder than the earlier scenes need. The emotional weight the critics praised is there. So is a certain tidiness, as if every thread had to be tied before the credits.
That is a small complaint against a film that mostly refuses to flatter its teenager. Charlie is not quirky for the sake of it. He is depressed, he is traumatized, and he is funny anyway. The film holds all three at once, which is rarer than it should be.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a coming-of-age drama that trusts its audience to sit with a boy who watches from the sidelines until he does not.
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