The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky adapted and directed his own novel, and the structure follows from that decision. The letter form survives but is thinned into voiceover, so the pressure comes from what Charlie leaves out rather than from incident. For most of the first hour there is barely a plot at all: the film spends its time assembling a friendship and withholding a single memory, then opens that memory in the last half hour. The film exists because an actor pushed for it. After her agent told her nobody wanted to finance the project, Emma Watson flew to Los Angeles and pitched it herself to studio executives one after another, and it was greenlit only after those meetings. The locations are real. School scenes were shot at Peters Township High School south of Pittsburgh, the truck sequence in the Fort Pitt Tunnel. The novel behind it has for years been among the most frequently challenged books in American school libraries, listed over sexual content, drug use, suicide and queer characters, which is an honest warning about how directly the film treats the same material. Right for a viewer willing to trust a teenager’s narration and to let the tension come from omission. Wrong for anyone who cannot sit through an explicit account of child abuse, a suicide attempt and a psychiatric admission.