‘WONDER’ DOESN’T FACE UP TO ITS PROMISE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Julia Roberts and (behind the prosthetics) Jacob Tremblay in 'Wonder'

The most wondrous thing about “Wonder” is the level of teacher skills and classroom expectations in the sixth grade in what must be one of the finest schools film-makers could find in California.

The second most wondrous thing is how dutifully and simplistically the well dressed kids in the school reflect a stereotype adult concept of good kids, bullies, intervening kids, bullying situations, on-the-spot rethinking  and redemption when confronted by a kid whose face is like a slimmed down version of “The Elephant Man,” technically the incurable Treacher Collins syndrome

The movie is not meant to be a tale of absolute generalities, like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” which posited a perfect liberal household against the issue of interracial marriage.  Underneath it really means to be a sweet uplifting story pretending to real life about how the world should respond to a child whose face was messed up at birth and has evolved into a boy who only finds love within his family and hurtful stares everywhere else. 

Some noted actors are wasted in the effort to reassure him – Mandy Patinkin as a sympathetic principal, Owen Wilson as the hippest loving dad in captivity, Julia Roberts, aging openly into roles of maternal dimension, and newcomer Izabela Vidovic who has the difficult task of making at least one teenager seem normal and nice. 

In what this year seems a Hollywood trend, the good kids in schools are associated with the drama clubs that largely produced the current young writers of these movies. Personally, as a drama club enthusiast, I would like to believe that’s true. But like many things in the movie I feel the vision is from Hollywood on high.

The makeup artists for Jacob Tremblay – a normal looking youngster who is quite effective as the object of so much hate – merit a special award for his looks. They are totally in keeping with what the syndrome can do to a face, justifying why Auggie is so dismayingly stared at (and who among us wouldn’t), realistic enough to fool the audience and help the actor inside, and yet not so frightening that we don’t grow to like and even want to hug the son having so much trouble making connections.

It’s sort of a shame that director Stephen Chboskly (also co-screenwriter) went for students who melt so obviously in sympathy or behave so objectionably even when events and peer pressure are against them. There are also cardboard efforts to make unthinking parents at the school the real villains.

The need for the world to open up to kids like Auggie, who are just kids underneath though Auggie is also shown as a scientific genius, is a good message communicated in extreme examples, tear-inducing moments  and even an extended concluding hallelujah that puts this film on a curious list of 2017 wonders – Wonder Woman, Wonderstruck, Wonder Wheel and Wonder. 

Wonder what word will dominate Hollywood titles this  year?

OTHER RECENT FILM REVIEWS WITH OSCAR CONNECTIONS:
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THREE BILLBOARDS

THE POST

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

PHANTOM THREAD

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Or scroll all Noth's recent film reviews at domsdomain.blogspot.com

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.