“It takes a lot to look this good.”
Wonder (2017), a sentimental parable of how to enact kindness by seeing through exteriors into the soul of a good person, is not, itself, a good movie. Directed by Stephen Chbosky, the movie is tripe, really, although it’s the kind of tripe that wisely smears the canvas with supporting players like Mandy Patinkin and Noah Jupe who carry the leaden weight of this thing that resembles a story but is more like an experiment in dramatized Hallmark cards.
- Helpfully on-the-nose voice over narration from several points-of-view? Check.
- Overlooked sibling living in the shadow of a living medical miracle? Check.
- Doting stay-at-home mom? Check.
- Supportive working dad? Check.
- Comfortable home and family life with clear points of comparison that make other characters in the story world come out wanting? Check.
- Earnest best-friend with working-class roots? Check.
- Youthful romance? Check.
- Spoiled rich kid who is also a bully? Check.
Community members from several ethnic and racial groups, although definitely in the background as support for the WASP lead and his family? Check and check.
Does the movie work, though? Does it achieve the kind of entertainment and reassuring escapism that so many moviegoers crave from this sort of pedigreed material based on the multi-million copy, best-selling YA novel from 2012 by R.J. Palacio?
Of course.
Budgeted at $20 million, Wonder earned well over $300 million from global ticket-takers. It features an appealing lead performer, Jacob Tremblay, as Auggie Pullman, a boy afflicted with a rare facial deformity for which he’s undergone dozens of surgeries to correct his look in a more normative direction. His father, Nate (Owen Wilson), works somewhere, doing something that earns a lot of money because Auggie’s mother, Isabel (Julia Roberts), has been a stay-at-home-schooler since Auggie was born, leaving Auggie’s older sister, Via (Izabela Vidovic), feeling neglected and unseen. And they live in a gigantic, multi-floor Upper Manhattan townhome. And Auggie wants to be an astronaut but loves Halloween when nobody can see his face because he wears a costume. And he attends a private prep school where green salad is served, and eaten, in school lunch.
Is any of this believable? Does it matter?
The ace-winner in the movie’s poker hand is two-fold: Julia Roberts, who remains a show stopping presence, even in firm middle age where the showy roles of youth are reduced to more matronly fare; and the fantasy of seeing children behave better than their real-world counterparts.
–September 30, 2018
