Directed by: Stephen Chbosky
Written by: Stephen Chbosky, Steven Conrad, Jack Thorne
Starring: Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson
IMDb Link
August "Auggie" Pullman is a child with physical differences caused by genetic problems who faces extreme stigma at school. The film follows Auggie as he comes to terms with how the others at school treat him and how to act because of it and makes a couple of important friends along the way. It's mostly well-handled light drama with slight pacing issues (perhaps due to being adapted from a book) that's appropriately wholesome and positive. Even when you know what's coming it's hard not to get a little misty at the sheer purity of it all.
A lot of the effectiveness in the film's execution is in the employment and performance of Auggie, played wonderfully (there, I said it) by Jacob Tremblay, who manages to exude the perfect combination of trialed optimism clouded by shyness: he keeps Auggie's circumstances grounded even as they tend toward convenient or melodramatic. As Auggie cries, laughs, or yells in his situation, it's largely Tremblay that sells it, no doubt helped by some excellent make-up work.
Much of the cast is just as strong. Izabela Vidovic as Auggie's sister Via plays the lost and frustrated background child well, and the film's devotion to making her a three-dimensional character lends itself to her performance. Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson are also suitably sugar-sweet as the parents, both loving but with meaningful differences in their approach, Roberts perpetually on-edge as the more actively worried Isabel and Wilson fitting the rock of a father in Nate like a glove. Nate isn't as developed as the other two, but it allows him to move out of the way of conflicts or hold the family together as he needs to.
What holds the movie back is the somewhat disjointed way it moves between multiple stories, and tries to tell so many in quick succession. Giving Auggie a narrative voice in the story is almost necessary, and adding a voice for Via created a really interesting dynamic that fleshed out her character very well, but the two stories seem to act mostly independently of one another, and it begins to complicate when we get a perspective from both Auggie's and Via's best friends. They aren't bad sequences, merely a little hurried; drawing focus temporarily away from the main story to flesh out the significant secondary characters is a good idea, it just suffers from taking the translation from book to screen a little to literally, effectively trying to tell a couple of vignettes that slow down the main story and only add character that can largely be inferred by what we've already seen. I was almost surprised that they didn't also give a quick mini-background for Auggie's bully, because the film certainly built up to it in a similar fashion to the other two. Furthermore, the film as an adaptation seemed intent on keeping as many conflicts from the book as possible, and as a result tells several stories by introducing and resolving conflict within the same scene. The film's almost a roller-coaster, taking little rises and dips as it sprinkles these seemingly throwaway concepts around the two primary conflicts. They're not without purpose, just once again reinforcing things that we were already thoroughly aware of, extra meat that probably works better on page than screen. The number of times that the film felt as if was ending due to coming to the end of one of its mini-conflicts was strange enough to be of note. That said, it's impossible to ignore how sweet and well-meaning this movie is through all of this.
The Short Version: Wonder is so wholesome it's impossible not to like, and carried by strong performances from an excellent cast, but also suffers from pacing issues that make some of its multitude of narrative threads never quite come together cohesively. I do recommend it if you're in need of something so sweet you simply have to smile.
Rating: 7/10
Published December 7th, 2017
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