The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 15-year-old Charlie is recovering from a traumatic event in his life (the recent death of his best friend) and trying to adjust to high school. He soon finds a group of friends who haven't followed the herd mentality of adolescence, or so he thinks, and begins to find himself in them. Actually, when you read the plot of this movie in those terms, it sounds awfully cheap.

Some of the ideas in Wallflower seem so calculated to wrench out your heart that you feel writer-director Stephen Chbosky, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1999 novel, is performing the work of a surgeon, not a filmmaker. His movie resurrects a lot of the old devices and archetypes, including the hip, self-aware English teacher (Paul Rudd, more amiable than he's ever been because he doesn't appear to be trying so hard, nor does he seem as jaded as usual), and the parents who "just don't get it." Yes, Wallflower has most of the cliched ingredients of a teen drama. But yet it also has an effervescent sort of charm to it. You can't really feel any disdain for the world this film creates, because it's authentic, imaginative. Moreover, the relationships between adolescents and grown-ups and between adolescents and adolescents, is shown to be far more complex than "the parents just don't get it" or "the jocks don't talk to the geeks." It's refreshing.

Logan Lerman carries Wallflower with his wonderful performance, one of the strongest by an up-and-coming actor in recent memory. His Charlie feels the pain of everyone he knows, even of those who have caused him pain, and he can't let it go, or imagine it away. He reminded me of young Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Lerman makes it look so easy because he is, often, the most together of his friends (probably because he's hiding all his own problems so he won't fall apart.) The supporting cast includes Emma Watson, as Sam, the girl Charlie has a crush on, and Ezra Miller, as Patrick, Sam's step-brother, a remarkably self-aware young man who's also miserable because he's gay and has to keep his relationship with one of the football players a secret.

Wallflower is a wistful movie, one that makes you slightly depressed to have passed your teenage years, and slightly exuberant because you remember how bad they were, even if they weren't as cinematically bad as in this movie. (There are a lot of lovely moments in between the sad parts, though). I kept going back in my mind to John Hughes' movies, as they were, for me, the quintessential high school movies, even though they failed to reflect my own high school experience, which of course happened later than the 1980s. The high school experience that's reflected in Wallflower isn't in the same territory as a John Hughes movie though. It's more realistic, less sitcomish. You almost wish the John Hughes vision of high school life could be true, because it's such a fairy tale. Full of complications but all of them solved by the denouement. Wallflower won't solve the problems. It illuminates the people and leaves the problems where they are: some will go away with time, some won't. But the spirit that thrives in this joyful movie isn't nearly as temporal as those four years of prison, hell, and torment, or alternately freedom, euphoria, and excitement. And I liked that about it.

With Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie's parents, Johnny Simmons, Melanie Lynskey (as Charlie's Aunt Helen), Mae Whitman, Erin Wilhelmi, Joan Cusack, and Tom Savini. 102 min. ★★★½

For Your Consideration

Of all Christopher Guest's comedies, For Your Consideration (2006) emerges as the most uncanny in its portrayals, this time of Hollywood. (Perhaps this is because I'm more familiar with movies than I am with folk musicians, dog trainers, and local theater.) Guest co-wrote the script with Eugene Levy, both of whom appear, along with the usual suspects, playing various members of the Hollywood community, from actors to crew members to publicists and talk show hosts.

If there is a central character, it's Marilyn Hack (played with stunning, hallucinatory, grotesque perfection by the great Catherine O'Hara). Marilyn is a virtual has-been actress who is finally returning to the silver screen in an over-the-top soaper that's part Tennessee Williams, part From Here to Eternity. It's a turbulent drama about a Jewish family's frosty reunion during the Purim holiday season, aptly titled Home For Purim. Marilyn hears rumors, via the internet, about an Oscar nomination coming her way, and inflates the rumors into Oscar buzz, some fake fairy dust that soon sprinkles onto the heads of her co-stars, played by Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, and Christopher Moynihan.

It's tragically funny to watch all the bees working their industry, all of them vying for queenhood, some of them with expert precision, others with an astonishing lack of self-awareness. You can only emerge from this movie feeling you've looked directly into the tortured, ironic, narcissistic soul of Hollywood itself, as though this least-documentary of all Guest's films is the one actual documentary: a record as exact and untouched by narrative intention as C-SPAN.

The supporting cast includes scene-stealing Fred Willard as the co-host of a movie talk show. He's really on fire in this movie, whipping out little throwaway lines with stunning ease and subtlety: his character seems like a complete moron, yet he's also brimming with ironic hostility, aimed at the Hollywood types that make his show. Jane Lynch plays his co-star. She's a delight, but she is a overshadowed by Willard's hammy deviousness. Jennifer Coolidge plays a dippy producer who appears to be constantly drunk. Coolidge never gets as much screen time as you'd want, considering how funny she is. With John Michael Higgins, Ed Begley, Jr., Bob Balaban, Michael McKean, and Carrie Aizley; and in cameo appearances: Ricky Gervais, Sandra Oh, John Krasinski, Paul Dooley, Hart Bochner, and Claire Forlani.

Singin' in the Rain

Singin' in the Rain (1952) is perhaps the best movie musical ever made. It's a clever satire of the movie industry during its exciting but traumatic and precarious transition from the silent era to talking pictures. The satire is always well-crafted but never mean-spirited, and it would have been the perfect movie musical, except for two laboriously overlong dance numbers in the second half of the film. (Both of which seem like obvious padding and represent the only real lapses in judgment of the directors, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly.)

Unlike most musicals, the songs don't seem incidental to the plot, and they're worked into the story sporadically and contextually (most of the time), rather than every five minutes whether it works for the movie or not. Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds head the cast. Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a silent screen star who sees star quality in the plucky girl-next-door Kathy Selden (Reynolds), whom he meets while running away from "adoring" fans trying to tear off pieces of his suit as souvenirs.

As Cosmo Brown, Don Lockwood's best friend and former Vaudeville partner (and a talented singer, dancer and musician in his own right), Donald O'Connor shines, like an early version of Sean Hayes, but with far more mock innocence. He's this movie's comic relief, always ready with a comical expression or a good quip to deflate the pomposity of the studio execs or disarm the stupidity of the movie stars. He would have saved just about any movie from total destruction, except Singin' in the Rain has the graciousness not to be self-important, so it doesn't need saving. There's no dewy-eyed sincerity here: instead, it's a glamorous, exquisite jab at the falseness of Hollywood personalities and the tomfoolery of showbusiness.

Jean Hagen plays Lina Lamont, a popular actress because of her beauty, who possesses a shrill, unsophisticated speaking voice that's sure to ruin not only her career but also her studio (called Monumental Pictures), once it begins producing "talkies". Enter Debbie Reynolds, whose beautiful singing and speaking voice is dubbed over Lina's crowing, to give the endangered star some legitimacy in the new wave of sound.

The best songs in the film are O'Connor's rendition of "Make 'Em Laugh," "Good Morning" and the titular number, done with style and joyous aplomb by Gene Kelly, who is ever the performer's performer. Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed contributed most of the songs. The choreography is mostly smart, although one does grow weary of watching Gene Kelley tap dance after a while.

Rita Moreno appears in a bit part. With Millard Mitchell, Cyd Charisse, Douglas Fowley, King Donovan, and Madge Blake.