Almost Wonderful!
Yes, there are a few flaws, but this tale of a boy with ‘facial differences’ is ultimately one of the life-affirming treats of the year
There will be many, surely, who look at the synopsis of Wonder and think exactly what I did: hmm, a film about a young boy with facial deformities growing up in New York? That doesn’t sound like anything I particularly want to see in the run-up to Christmas.
Well, I was wrong and others will be too, and they risk missing out on a film that while undoubtedly sentimental turns out to be one of the life-affirming treats of the year. Yes, it will make you cry but you’ll also come out vowing to be a slightly better person.
August Pullman – played by Room star Jacob Tremblay – is 10 years old and has grown up surrounded by love. His devoted but intellectually frustrated mother, Isabel (Julia Roberts), loves him, his cooler-than-cool dad (Owen Wilson) loves him; heck, even his older troubled teenage sister, Via (Izabela Vidovic), loves him. But when he goes outside… well, at best people stare, at worst small children burst into tears.
That’s because August was born with what I’m still learning to call ‘facial differences’. Even after 27 separate surgeries, he still does not look remotely like other boys do. Small wonder that when he does venture outside he prefers to wear his beloved full-face space helmet and that his favourite holiday is Hallowe’en, when he can wear a mask without standing out.
And small wonder too that the difficult decision to stop teaching him at home and send him to middle school threatens to spark a crisis. Which is pretty much where Wonder – written and directed by Stephen Chbosky and adapted from RJ Palacio’s novel – begins.
Chbosky has become something of a specialist in films about difference and social isolation. His excellent last feature, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, from 2012, dealt with an awkward teenager struggling to settle in at high school, and he went on to write the screenplay for the definitive exemplar of the genre, Beauty And The Beast. You can tell he’s on familiar ground as we watch ‘Auggie’ – who we know from his own narration is an intelligent, likeable and funny boy – struggling to gain acceptance. The result is slick, emotional and hugely watchable. The casting of such Hollywood heavyweights as Roberts and Wilson hints at a film going all out for commercial success but Chbosky brings an art-house sensibility to proceedings too, breaking the story down into individual chapters and always ensuring his cast of characters are convincingly complex and fully rounded. The sections dealing with Via – a teenager resigned to playing second fiddle in her August-dominated family and facing her own trials at high school – are particularly effective. Every now and then, however, things get a little too polished. In a screenplay packed with nice lines, Via’s observation that her family is like the solar system (‘it revolves around the son, not the daughter’) smacks of a writer
‘Roberts is spot-on as a woman pulled in umpteen emotional directions’
burning the midnight oil, while the contrived-feeling section dealing with her estranged best friend, Miranda, bears the hallmarks of a writer simply trying too hard.
But Chbosky draws great performances from his big guns. Roberts, who these days barely makes a film a year, is deliciously spot-on as a woman being pulled in umpteen emotional directions – look out for the heart-wrenching moment when Auggie makes his first friend. And Wilson, an actor in serious need of a good performance, finds it here, albeit in the one slightly underwritten role and albeit delivering the sort of smart one-liners that most fathers dream of but never quite manage. All that said, I did find it slightly disappointing, in a day and age when we are more accustomed to seeing disabled actors, that to play Auggie the excellent Tremblay is not only wearing prosthetics but prosthetics that, I’m reliably informed, are considerably less alarming than the ‘differences’ described in the book.
That may seem over-sensitive when I had no such trouble with John Hurt in The Elephant Man or Eric Stoltz in the Oscar-winning and markedly similar Mask, but times change and it does seem particularly at odds with a film that is all about integration, seeing the person within and acceptance.