Tuesday, January 8, 2013
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
This was a good movie, but man, did it mess me up. I admire everything about the movie - the acting is excellent, the writing is clever, the story tackles some heavy subjects with tact and realism. And yet, as I watched the movie, I got more and more depressed, and the triumphant ending did nothing to change that. It's extremely difficult to even know how to write a review of this, because while I'm pretty sure it wasn't *supposed* to depress me, it did, and it's hard for me to separate that from the actual movie. So I'm giving it a medium star rating because I don't quite know what to do with it. 2.5 stars.
Flickchart: #985, below The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and above Legally Blonde.
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4 comments:
I can definitely appreciate the effect that this one had on you. I saw it by myself on a Sunday afternoon at the second-run theater on 16 December last year, just ahead of Christmas. I think I avoided that reaction in large part because I felt good at the time enough that there was a sort of distance between the me that directly connected with the content and the me that was sitting in the theater. I'm eager to read the novel, but it's about the size of a pamphlet and priced as high as the movie on Blu-ray. I have a psychological problem paying that kind of money for a book that small.
After sitting with this for awhile, I think the issue was that I *thought* I was going to see a movie about someone like me. If you write about someone who is a "wallflower," it comes with a connotation of aloneness and never being chosen. This movie revealed to me that I had a bit of a deep-seated resentment for movies about friendless, alone teens who HAVE A CLOSE-KNOT CIRCLE OF FRIENDS BY THE FIRST HALF HOUR OF THE MOVIE. That's not friendlessness. That's just not being friends with *everyone*. I would have been so delighted to have a single close friend in high school who wasn't someone I met online (though they were great). The idea that having several extremely welcoming and accepting friends is at all like, no, seriously, not having any friends, struck a nerve with me. I think if I rewatched it knowing that it's a different story than I thought, I wouldn't be quite so bothered by it.
That's a great point. I've thought about it myself often, though not from precisely the same perspective as you. I tend to be more annoyed that in movies, characters fall deeply in love after one chance encounter...but no one *ever* ends their conversations to one another with "I love you".
There's a lot to say about this issue, though. Is it that movies are afraid that their extrovert audiences will turn off if they're subjected to a depiction of someone who actually is friendless? Is it that film-makers themselves tend to be extroverts enough that they're clumsy about depicting introversion? What are some films that showed this properly and well? You might consider addressing these and other, unasked questions in a blog post all their own.
Hmm. Indeed, I may have to explore that in a blog post... a couple of jumbled thoughts on it for now:
I think it *does* have to do with an extroverted culture where only having one or two close friends is seen as being virtually the same as being friendless. I think it's also connected to the fact that it can be harder to write movies about people (especially teenagers) who genuinely don't have friends. What's motivating the action? How can you see the character's development if you can't see it in how they react to their friends? For introverts, their epiphanies tend to be motivated and noticed internally. Dramatic tension encourages an outside source to start or reveal that epiphany so we can see it happen. My real-life character-changing epiphanies, if filmed, would be like an hour and a half of me sitting, staring off into space, and maybe occasionally journaling. There are ways to make that kind of thing gripping drama, but it takes creativity and extra work.
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