IT’S A TEARJERKER
This moving adaptation of the children’s book, ‘Wonder’, is an open-hearted message movie you can't help but embrace. By
If you need to send a message, call Western Union!” the mogul Sam Goldwyn is said to have declared, which hasn’t stopped Hollywood finding a million ways to teach us lessons then and since. Wonder was a children’s novel — a widely-read, unashamedly messagey heartbreaker by RJ Palacio — and to approach it as grown-up cinema wouldn’t help anyone. The only way forward is to abandon cynicism at the door: that’s what the director Stephen Chbosky has done, in movie-izing this story about physical deformity and the playground as a last refuge for knee-jerk cruelty.
The main character is Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a 10year-old born with a rare condition that makes him look different — not Elephant Man different, or as gigantically so as Eric Stoltz’s character in the 1985 weepie Mask, but different enough. Until the point when the film begins, he’s been entirely home-schooled by his parents (Owen Wilson and Julia Roberts), and seeks refuge from staring eyes within an astronaut’s helmet.
“Please let them be nice to him,” we hear Roberts pray as she releases her son on his first day in middle school, and Wilson gingerly takes the helmet away. Of course, being children, his classmates stare and recoil, at least at first. The story is as much about their collective growth — their learning to look behind the surface — as Auggie’s courage in facing the world.
Chbosky preserves the book’s device of multiple narrators, moving from character to character, including that of Auggie’s older sister Via (the excellent Izabela Vidovic), whose quiet neglect amid the dramas surrounding her brother
The only way is to abandon cynicism at the door
gives the film a bittersweet counterpoint.
There’s one difference in the adaptation: Auggie’s chief tormentor, a trust-fund kid called Julian (Bryce Gheisar), is no longer given a distinct point of view. He’s intrusive enough even in Auggie’s part of the story, and that of Jack Will (Noah Jupe), the kid who tries hardest to befriend Auggie, but whose open-heartedness has its limits.
Reaching for the “mawkishness” stamp is easy enough for any adult viewer — too easy, as a defence mechanism against the film’s earnest feeling and irreproachable message about choosing to be kind. OK, the script strong-arms us into surrender here and there, but more often it gently takes an elbow, exactly as Chbosky did in 2012’s soulful coming-of-age drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
He’s got all the right performances rallying to his cause, headed by Tremblay, who comes good on his hard-to-forget breakthrough in the Oscar-winning drama Room, and lets us file away the hideous flop The Book of Henry as a different type of lesson learnt. He’s unrecognisable under the prosthetics, but his voice’s high, quavering vulnerability has character without needing to beg for our sympathies.
Wilson and Roberts are affecting on their own and opposite one another — they’re one of the more believable couples in recent US films, with his laissez-faire, you’re-the-boss manner and her emotional forthrightness see-sawing really well.
The film breaks Goldwyn’s rule into pieces, insisting on the educational value any mainstream portrait of impairment is bound to have, and inviting us all, kindly, to drop our guard.
The Daily Telegraph