Cringing high school freshman Charlie (Logan Lerman) has troubles aplenty, the most conspicuous being that he’s so thoroughly inconspicuous. His agonizing shyness and bookworm habits ensure that the only attention he attracts is from bullies. To alleviate his alienation, he scratches out letters to an anonymous “Friend,” narrating his daily miseries. Fortunately, one of Charlie’s shop classmates is Patrick (Ezra Miller), a cheeky, flamboyant senior who takes a shine (or is it pity?) on the unfortunate underclassman. Through Patrick’s kindness, the standoffish Charlie is drawn into the world of suburban Pittsburg’s self-proclaimed “Misfit Toys,” the outcast seniors for whom cultural hipness (read: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) trumps dreaded bourgeois conformity. This clique includes Patrick’s fetching, big-hearted stepsister Sam (Emma Watson), who for Charlie becomes the object of a knee-buckling May-December crush.
Writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapted The Parks of Being a Wallflower from his own semi-autobiographical young-adult novel of the same name, a book which created a bit of a sensation among teen readers upon its publication in 1999. However, apart from its frank treatment of adolescent coital fumbling and LSD use, Chbosky’s story is a thoroughly conservative Bildungsroman. Distilled down to its essence, the plot is absurdly straightforward: a reserved and friendless kid comes out of his shell thanks to his super-cool older friends. That’s not much of a character arc, and such a tale is only appealing to the extent that Charlie himself is a sympathetic and fascinating figure. While Chbosky colors his film with enough knowing outsider angst to make his protagonist relatable, Charlie (and Lerman) is far too anodyne to truly engage the viewer.
The director and actors generally fail to employ the tale’s profuse teen anguish for anything beyond scattershot characterization. (Miller is the sole bright spot among the performers, if only because he’s obviously having such a dazzlingly good time.) The story is peppered with closely-guarded secrets, most prominently Charlie’s troubled psychiatric history and unresolved guilt regarding a favorite aunt’s death. There are hookups, breakups, misunderstandings, and revelations, but nothing much happens. “These Are the Best Days of Our Life,” seems to be the film’s thematic nut, which is awfully thin stuff on which to hang even a coming-of-age dramedy. Moreover, the film is weirdly coy about its period-piece nature, to the point of distraction. The absence of cell phones is the first clue that Wallflower is not a present-day tale, but it’s the soundtrack that seems to definitively place the film in the 1993-1994 school year. It’s a testament to Wallflower’s forgettable character that while its wistful pop culture button-pushing is aimed squarely at this reviewer’s adolescent memories, the film fails to connect even as a pleasurable dose of swoony Glory Days nostalgia.
