‘Wonder’ Will Definitely Make You Cry, But It’s Up To Something More

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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: Wonder
Director: Steven Chbosky
Starring: Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Mandy Patinkin
Available on: Amazon Prime and iTunes

Wonder is based on a YA novel. You’d know this even if you didn’t bother to check the film’s credits. There is a sound and feel to the movie that immediately puts you into YA mode. It’s there in the voice-over narration of Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a 5th-grader who was born with facial deformities that were severe enough that, 27 surgeries later, it’s still very noticeable. That voice-over is, in the YA tradition, a little writerly, a little too wise in its observations of the world (do 10-year-olds really talk about “trust-fund kids”?), and a little too eager to wrap everything up into little motifs. Auggie, for example, favors an astronaut’s mask in order to hide his face, and much like an eager parent trying to plan their child’s birthday party, the astronaut theme is everywhere, even if it doesn’t make a whole ton of sense.

After being home-schooled by his mother (Julia Roberts) for his whole life, Auggie is jumping into the wild and scary world of mainstream elementary school. The kindly principal (Mandy Patinkin) commissions three young students to help Auggie get used to the place, and like any good fairy tale, they run the gamut: Julian is too mean, Charlotte is too dramatic, but maybe Jack Will will be just right? It’s a familiar setup for the story about an outcast kid navigating bullies and a world that doesn’t understand him to ultimately find the friends who look past what’s different about him and see his true self. And Wonder is that, for sure. Augie’s story will make you smile and make you cry. But the film, directed by Steven Chbosky from R. J. Palacio’s novel, is up to a good bit more.

There are quirks present in Wonder that betray its origins and make you long for a slightly more muscular version of Auggie’s story. But I’m not sure I’d want a version of this story that’s much different than the one we got. Chbosky — who directed the film version of his own YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower — takes advantage of the story’s novelistic roots to open the film up in ways I was really not expecting. Stories like these tend to stay pretty focused on the main character, and with Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson cast as Auggie’s parents, you’d expect them to get a little attention too. But one by one, Wonder opens itself up to the other characters in the film: Auggie’s sister, Via (Izabela Vidovic); his tentative best friend Jack (Noah Jupe); Via’s estranged best friend, Miranda. In addition to these story detours, there are side characters who pop in briefly for meaningful scenes. Mandy Patinkin as the rare school administrator who sees what’s going on in his school; Sonia Braga as a grandmother who sees how neglected Via’s been. It’s the kind of approach to these characters that you’d expect from a TV series, one that slowly evolves from the story of one outcast kid to an ensemble series whose attentions branch out to everyone his story touches. It’s unexpected and, under Cbosky’s typically empathetic eye, quite welcome. There are emotional peaks in this movie that don’t have anything to do with Auggie at all. In particular, if you care about movie scoring at all, there’s a scene at a high school play where composer Marcelo Zarvos dips into his own archives and revives his score for The Door in the Floor to unbelievably strong effect.

Wonder turned out to be one of the great unexpected successes of 2017. Opening opposite Justice League as essentially counter-programming, Wonder made roughly a third of what the behemoth superhero movie did, and on a quarter fewer screens to boot. All told, Wonder topped $130 million at the domestic box-office. It ranks as the fourth-highest-earning movie of Julia Roberts’ career. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a wonder. With all that money, you’d think quality would be ancillary, but it’s a relief to know that Wonder doesn’t get by simply by mugging its audience for tears over a sweet outcast boy played by the eminently tear-inducing Jacob Tremblay. It’s a film whose horizons are far broader than they needed to be, that looks at the experience of a 10-year-old boy as inseparable from the experience of those around him, his parents and teachers and siblings and friends. There’s something really humane about that, and amid the YA-friendly flourishes, something true in there as well.

Where to stream Wonder