I don’t generally like movie adaptations of my favourite books. In fact, I usually avoid them. The Lovely Bones, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Golden Compass; I’ve skipped them all. But the trailer for Perks had me so hopeful. And how could it NOT be wonderful, with a stellar cast and Stephen Chbosky writing the screenplay himself!?
I remember the last time I was this excited about seeing a movie; before seeing Spider-Man in theatres, the trailer for Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe came on. I was transfixed, in awe, it was just so beautiful. The scene in the trailer where Jude walks into his now-empty room, and “Hey Jude” begins to play, is just… agh. I can’t even describe it; it’s just pure magic.
When I finally saw the movie, I sat in the theatre anxiously awaiting that one scene. And when it finally came on, and Jude opened the door to his room, I held my breath, waiting for “Hey Jude” to start playing—but it didn’t. It was the same scene, but the magic was gone. I have never been so disappointed.
That was sort of how the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower made me feel.
And let me be clear, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is not a bad movie, by any stretch. It’s is a beautiful movie. The cinematographer has worked miracles. Usually movies this beautiful are fantasy movies of some kind—Lord of the Rings, for example. It’s rare that movies with suburban settings like this one are this pretty. And the soundtrack is a thing of genius as well. It reminds me a lot of Juno in that sense—the soundtrack so perfectly matches the tone of the film and the personalities of the characters. And I appreciated that many of the songs referenced in the book made their way into the soundtrack. “Asleep” by The Smiths is featured prominently, as are songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, though I was disappointed in the lack of The Beatles.
Overall though, what really threw me was the pacing and the editing. The perennial problem with book-to-screen adaptations is that there is too much content to fit into such a short span of time, but Perks could easily have been longer—it was under two hours. And it’s such a short book; I thought Chbosky could have fit more in. Charlie’s sister’s storyline is touched only briefly, Charlie’s parents’ roles are cut down considerably, and the entire Christmas sequence is rushed and unnecessarily shortened, zooming right from Christmas Mass to the New Year’s party.
In terms of editing, I found there were a lot of very choppy cuts. One scene in particular — when the epic song “Come On Eileen” is cut off mid-chorus to smear to the Homecoming Dance after-party — felt way too abrupt. Maybe the sharp cuts were a purposeful expression of how Charlie is feeling, how his blackouts affect him, how he loses time, and memories, and is still trying to figure out what happened to him when he was a kid. It’s definitely possible. But I think that slower transitions, with a slow fade out and music bleeding into the next scene, would have been better for the feel of the film as a whole.
The other thing that bothered me was how Chbosky played with the time in the movie. In the book, the entire story is told in past tense, because it’s told through Charlie’s letters, relating what has already happened. In the movie, though there are a few voiceovers where Charlie dictates his letters, much of the story happens in the present. This is most evident in the way Chbosky alters the most famous quote from the novel. In the book, Charlie writes, “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.” In the movie, Charlie instead says, “I feel infinite.”
While I perfectly understand that Chbosky had to change this because movies just work better in the present tense, I really think it alters something fundamental about the story. For me, and I’m sure for many people my age that read this book in high school and are now re-experiencing it several years after they’ve graduated, Perks is all about nostalgia. It’s about looking back at how things were, and seeing how far we’ve come. This is what Charlie does at the end of the story—he looks back at the past year, seeing where he started and how far he’s come, and where he still has to go. In putting the whole movie in the present tense, I think this sense of nostalgia is lost.
I’m hoping to see the movie again; it really was beautiful. I hate that I let my crazy-high expectations ruin it for me. I really don’t think I can even give it a grade. Piece of advice from me: If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it, but do NOT watch the trailer before you do. Have any of you seen it yet? Does it replicate the book faithfully? Sound off in the comments below!
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