The Perks of Being a Wallflower

After being somewhat critical of Daniel Radcliffe's first attempt to generate a post-Potter film career last year with Woman in Black, I was eager to see what had happened to Emma Watson - who played alongside Radcliffe for nearly a decade as his straight-laced teacher's pet chum Hermoine.  Radcliffe has made a stuttering but promising start in his new career, so it would be good to see if Watson could hit the ground running.  After all, she got steadily better as the Potter films progressed.  By the end of the Octrillogy (is this a word?) she looked like a proper actress rather than someone who had been cast as a 10 year and was doing their best to make as good an effort as possible.  Like Rupert Grint.

And so on we come to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which Watson and Ezra Miller (who was Kevin in We need to talk about Kevin) play a couple of High School seniors (which I think is American speak for upper sixth form) who take the new boy under their wing.  Watson and Miller play Sam and Patrick, half siblings who along with their friends have a labyrinthine history that new boy Charlie (played by Logan Lerman) only gets the briefest of glimpse at and has a tough time understanding.  Charlie has problems of his own, a personal history of mental issues, death, tragedy and abuse that I wont reveal details of here for fear of spoiling anyone's enjoyment.  These depths make these characters very life-like, very real people with real histories.

The depth that the film's characters have and my eventual enjoyment of it surprised me, because after about 15 minutes of watching I wasn't enjoying it at all.  I found Charlie to be annoying, I was struggling to cope with Watson's American accent and couldn't stop imagining Miller as Kevin.  The film looked like it was going to be very shallow; yet another drama-lite in which white middle class American teenagers over-obsess  about their own self-importance and discover alcohol, drugs and sex while crying a lot and having to go to university.  All that money, choice and opportunity - the pain of it all!

Luckily though that only lasted 15 minutes.  I quickly got used to Watson's accent and Miller's presence on screen when I realised she was actually pretty good at it and he was just - you know - acting and not really a mental case.  Rather than go down the much-trodden path of eye-rolling teenage introspection, the film found a much more interesting route through the mire of teenage life.  It's depicted as a voyage of discovery and learning, in which all things are possible but in which there are still difficulties to be overcome, most of them involving the expectations that you have of yourself.  It's a film that revels in wonderful moments of discovery - like hearing a David Bowie song for the first time - and allows its characters to enjoy them as we all did when growing up.  I worked out that that Charlie wasn't an annoying character at all, rather it was my expectations of what teenagers should be like that was annoying me.  Once I'd sorted this out in my mind I enjoyed the film a whole lot more!

The film is simply a beautifully told story.  It's got lot of different things going on in the background, each one of which you might want to fixate on an proclaim that it's 'about'.  There's stuff about abuse, homophobia, coming of age, love, loss, mental illness - some of it overt and some less so.  There's a lot there for anyone who wants to give it a chance to play out to the final scenes.  In reality though I don't think the film is about any of these things, rather its about how everyone is made up of a patchwork of memories and experiences, some good and some bad, but all of them part of who we are.  The double-plus bonus is that Emma Watson is very good.  Unlike Daniel Radcliffe, Watson seems to have an agent who understands that she needs to get away from the fantasy genre and prove her acting if she's ever going to be taken seriously.  By taking a role in a film that many will see as arthouse and playing a character with a foreign accent there's no doubting she's done that.  Hopefully that'll continue - though a quick look at her imdb entry reveals that she's going to be in this .  Starring and directed by Seth Rogan.  Hmmm.