Stephen Chbosky’s Wonder wants very badly to make you cry, and for long stretches it succeeds. The film follows August “Auggie” Pullman, a 10-year-old in Brooklyn with mandibulofacial dysostosis, as he enters fifth grade at Beecher Prep and becomes, for the first time, a kid among other kids. Jacob Tremblay plays Auggie. Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson play his parents, Isabel and Nate. The movie runs 113 minutes and was released in the United States on November 17, 2017, by Lionsgate.
Trailer, via Family Movie Faves.
An Astronaut Helmet in Brooklyn
Auggie was born with a rare facial deformity and has had 27 surgeries to help him function. He wears an astronaut helmet when out in public. Isabel has homeschooled him. As fifth grade approaches, she and Nate decide to enroll him at Beecher Prep, a private middle school.
That decision is the whole engine of the film. Wonder is not really about a boy with a facial difference; it is about everyone around him learning to be less afraid of one. Chbosky, who co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Conrad and Jack Thorne, adapts R. J. Palacio’s 2012 novel with a soft touch and a firm grip on the tear ducts.
Julian Albans and the Tour of Beecher Prep
The cruelty arrives fast. Julian Albans, the class bully, and his friends Amos Conti, Miles Noury and Henry Joplin ostracize and bully Auggie from the start. Auggie does find a friend: Jack Will, played by Noah Jupe, whom he met during a tour of the school before term began.
Then Halloween breaks it. Daisy, the family dog, ruins Auggie’s planned Boba Fett costume, so he wears his Ghostface costume from the previous year. Entering homeroom, he overhears Jack — who does not recognize him, expecting Boba Fett — joining Julian and his friends in mocking him. Worse, Auggie hears Jack say he was forced to be friends with him and would “kill himself” if he looked like Auggie.
Auggie goes home sick. Isabel abandons her mother-daughter day with Via to pick him up. Via, already hurt by her own best friend Miranda Navas, convinces him to go trick-or-treating with her anyway.
Summer Dawson and the Word ‘Ghostface’
Auggie avoids Jack and forms a new friendship with Summer Dawson, played by Millie Davis, confiding in her about the split. When Jack asks Summer why Auggie is avoiding him, she gives him one word: “Ghostface.” That is enough. Jack realizes his mistake and apologizes by partnering with Auggie for a science project instead of Julian and Amos.
This is the film’s best structural idea, and it is worth naming plainly: Wonder keeps handing the microphone to someone other than Auggie. Via gets her chapter. Jack gets his. Miranda gets hers. The movie is less a portrait of a boy than a relay of people trying and failing to be decent to him.
Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Mandy Patinkin
Roberts plays Isabel as a mother running on fumes and love, and she is the film’s most reliable source of feeling. Wilson’s Nate is warmer and funnier than the role requires. Mandy Patinkin plays Mr. Tushman, the principal, with the patience of a man who has seen a thousand fifth graders and still likes them.
Daveed Diggs plays Mr. Browne, the English teacher, and he is the film’s quiet conscience. Diggs gets the classroom scenes that carry the movie’s thesis about precepts and kindness, and he makes them land without preaching. Danielle Rose Russell plays Miranda. Izabela Vidovic plays Via. Bryce Gheisar plays Julian.
The casting was assembled over 2016. Tremblay was cast as Auggie on April 14, 2016, while Roberts was in talks to play his mother. Three weeks later, Roberts’ casting was confirmed and Chbosky was set to direct. Wilson joined on June 27, 2016. Two weeks after that, newcomer Jupe joined as Auggie’s best friend at school. Diggs was cast as Mr. Browne on July 15, 2016. On August 19, 2016, Sônia Braga joined as Isabel’s mother.
The Makeup Nomination and the 27 Surgeries
At the 90th Academy Awards, Wonder was nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. That nomination is the film’s most honest credential. The prosthetics work that turns Tremblay into Auggie is the thing that makes the premise function at all; without it, every scene collapses into an actor in a mask.
Here is where the film’s choices get interesting. Wonder is a family comedy drama, and it plays like one. It is based on a 2012 novel, and it keeps the novel’s chapter-shifting structure without the novel’s room to breathe. At 113 minutes, the movie has to move, and moving means the smaller chapters — Miranda’s, especially — get compressed into gestures.
A $315 Million Return on a $20 Million Budget
The numbers say the audience showed up. Wonder grossed $315 million worldwide on a $20 million production budget. It received positive reviews from critics. A spin-off and prequel film, White Bird, was released in October 2024, with Bryce Gheisar reprising his role as Julian.
The commercial story is easy to explain and the critical story is not. Wonder does not have a villain problem; it has a kindness problem. Julian is a bully with no interior life, and the film never bothers to give him one. That is a real limitation, and it is the reason the movie plays better in memory than it does in the moment.
The best scenes in Wonder are the ones where nobody is being taught anything. Via’s resentment at being the sibling of a medical event. Miranda’s loneliness. Jack’s cowardice and his shame about it. These are the beats that feel observed rather than arranged.
The worst scenes are the ones that announce their own lessons. Mr. Browne’s precepts, the science-fair reconciliation, the standing ovation of a finale — all of it works, and all of it works too hard. Chbosky stages adolescent interiority well enough, but here he is staging something closer to a parable, and parables flatten.
So what actually matters in Wonder? Three things, in order.
- Tremblay’s performance under the prosthetics, which is the load-bearing element of the entire film.
- Roberts as Isabel, who gives the movie its emotional floor rather than its ceiling.
- The structural gamble of handing chapters to Via, Jack and Miranda, which is the only thing here that feels like a real idea rather than a good intention.
What is noise: the science-fair subplot, the Julian thread, and the recurring insistence that the audience be told what to feel rather than shown.
The Verdict on Wonder
Wonder is a good film with a soft spine. It is sincere, well-acted and built on a premise that earns its tears honestly, and it is also a movie that would rather resolve a conflict than sit inside one. The 27 surgeries, the astronaut helmet, the Halloween betrayal — these are strong, specific details, and the film uses them well. It just does not trust them to be enough.
The comparison that matters is to the 2012 novel, and the comparison is not favorable. Palacio’s book had the space to let Julian, Via and Miranda be people. The film turns them into functions. That is the cost of a 113-minute runtime, and Wonder pays it.
Still, the film does something the Academy noticed and audiences rewarded: it takes a child with a facial difference seriously as a subject rather than a symbol, and it casts a real actor to carry him. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, the whole reason the movie works when it works.
Wonder is worth seeing, and worth seeing with the people it was made for. It is not a great film, and it is not trying to be. It is a film that wants to be kind, and mostly is. That is a lower bar than it sounds, and Wonder clears it.
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