Wonder (2017)
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
The story of August Pullman – a boy with facial differences – who enters fifth grade, attending a mainstream elementary school for the first time.
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He likes Star Wars and learning about space.
Auggie is a science geek who loves “Star Wars” and Minecraft, ice cream and X-Box sports games; he’s fueled by all-American fantasies of going to outer space.
He loves “ Star Wars ” and Minecraft.
While he certainly gets handed his fair share of gut punches and is forced to shed more than a few tears, he is also a sweet and normal kid who loves Star Wars and expresses a wonderful sense of self-deprecation -- opening the movie by referring in voice over to his birth as a joke, with his deformity being the punchline.
When your main character dreams up encounters with Star Wars characters that come to life; when his school has Mandy Patinkin as the principal; when the film stops to demonstrate and explain a very cool refraction experiment that you can subsequently try at home – well, sometimes you have to just let go and surrender yourself to the wonder.
Born with severe facial deficiencies (explained as the result of an unlucky combination of bad genetics from his parents played by Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson, also described as a disease that could have easily went to his four years older sister Via), Auggie, as he is nicknamed by his family, is an introverted child fascinated by astronomy and sci-fi entertainment such as Star Wars undergoing homeschooling conducted by his mother Isabel.
In some ways, “Wonder” feels like another “Mask,” the moving 1985 film about a teenage boy named Rocky with a skull deformity.
Peter Bogdanovich did it in “Mask” (1985), his straight-up tale of a teenager with a face of scowling strangeness who came to embrace the person he was.
His life up to now has not been easy despite his generally sunny attitude: He was born with a craniofacial disorder, which puts him, for comparison, in the same category as the Eric Stoltz character in the 1985 movie, Mask.
Comparisons will be made to Peter Bogdanovich's Mask, but where that film surrounds its goo with edgy surfaces, Wonder is full-on tender.
Late in the film, Via is part of a production of “Our Town,” and there is in Chbosky’s film a touch of Thornton Wilder and a feel for the honest everyday rhythms of life.
Basada en el best seller de la escritora R.J Palacio, Chbosky, con un tono alentador, invita a la apreciación de la vida, con sus complicaciones y sus momentos óptimos, sin caer demasiado en excesos lacrimógenos que ofrecen los retratos del bullying y de los individuos que luchan contra la adversidad, como en El Gran Simon (Simon Birch, 1998).
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David Lynch did it in “The Elephant Man” (1980), his shrewdly restrained, underbelly-of-London Gothic horror weeper, which revealed John Merrick, beneath his warped and bubbled flesh, to be a figure of entrancing delicacy.
But when they have, the results have often been moving and memorable — like David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” and Peter Bogdanovich’s “Mask.”
With Wonder, he has help from Jack Thorne (How I Live Now) and Steve Conrad (creator of the relentlessly darkly comedic Amazon original series, Patriot) in adapting R.J. Palacio’s novel.
Chbosky and cinematographer Don Burgess, who’s no stranger to dream arrangements (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Spider-Man, The Polar Express, Source Code) do a wonderful job of creating these sequences.
And while screenwriter Steve Conrad wrote Ben Stiller’s unforgivably mush-brained The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, his script for The Pursuit of Happyness evoked without undue sentimentality a parent’s primal terror of homelessness.
And Conrad penned the screenplay for 2006’s tearjerker The Pursuit of Happyness.
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Chbosky and cinematographer Don Burgess, who’s no stranger to dream arrangements (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Spider-Man, The Polar Express, Source Code) do a wonderful job of creating these sequences.
When we drop in on Miranda’s world, there’s a surprising and moving motive behind the “Mean Girls” persona.