Textured turns from cautionary drama’s young leads
LERMAN AND WATSON. Portray troubled protagonists in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”
This seems to be the season for initially lighthearted but eventually disturbing movies about troubled youth. Last month, they were represented by “Ruby Sparks,” about a young writer whose literary creation comes to life and prompts him to exercise complete and autocratic control over her every thought and action.
Last month, the follow-up production in the same vein was “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” It’s a cautionary tale about a similarly troubled high school freshman who can’t fit in, until he falls in with a group of seniors who, for the first time in years, make him feel that he’s a part of something bigger than his lonely and grim existence.
Dark secret
What has made him such a psychological basket case at so alarmingly early an age? In time, we learn that he shares a deep, dark secret with an older relative that has made him feel used and abused, thus inhibiting him from relating to others in a more hopeful, positive way—until his new friends show that they like him for and as himself.
Eventually, he develops special relationships with each of them, especially with the similarly troubled and abused character played by Emma Watson, the ingenue lead of the “Harry Potter” film series, who’s now a daring, young-adult actress.
Partners in their shared pain due to their traumatic experiences, they are drawn to each other emotionally and sexually—but, they end up with other people until just before the film’s chilling denouement.
Other textured characters inhabit the movie, including Watson’s character’s gay stepbrother, whose free spirit helps the movie’s young protagonist address his long-sublimated needs and wants.
In the process, he is forced to finally face up to his raging, seething demons, which are so dauntingly monstrous that we understand perfectly well why he’s avoided wrestling with them for so long.
We can’t go into “spoiler alert” mode for fear of letting the ferocious tiger out of its cage and thus ruining the revelation for you. But, we can hint that the battle is so bitter and prolonged that the young protagonist almost gives up—not just on himself, but on life itself.
Difficult challenge
To the credit of the production and its cast of gifted young actors, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is up to the difficult challenge poised by its complex story.
In particular, Logan Lerman portrays the title character with a keen understanding way beyond his tender years. He has the face of an angel, but the corroded core of a boy victimized for so many years, when he was unable to defend himself, or even comprehend the abuse that he was being subjected to by someone he loved—and ended up hating.
As for Watson, we appreciate how radically she’s reinvented herself in the post-“Potter” chapter of her development as a film actress. But, we should also note that, in the process, she seems to have given up too much.
In opting to play her character in this movie as bitterly abused and jaded, she may have painted herself and her thespic options into an excessively tight corner.
We trust that, in her very next film role, Watson will make it a point to go in other, less constricting directions, for fear of being cynically typecast much too early in her young-adult acting career.
