Looper and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

It's been a film-heavy week. On Tuesday I saw The Hunger Games (good) and The Cabin In The Woods (incredible); in the past 24 hours I have seen two new releases, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) and Looper (Rian Johnson). Fantastically, I didn't pay a penny to see any of them, despite going to the cinema for each. Anyway, I haven't done any reviews in a while so though it was high time I did some.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 2012)

It's a fairly common occurrence that a writer will adapt their novel into a screenplay themselves; rarer, though, is for the writer to direct thing, although this is exactly what Stephen Chbosky has done for this complex, touching and highly-strung comedy drama. Charlie (Logan Lurman) is an outsider with a troubled past in his Freshman year at high-school, where he befriends a group of oddballs in their senior year, including Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller). As the year progresses Charlie grows closer to the group, and we gradually discover that our protagonists have much more going on under the surface than is immediately apparent.

The balance between comedy and drama is an interesting one. The suggestion that the film might take some dark turns is established from the off, with Charlie penning heartfelt confessionary letters (the source material was an epistolary novel) to an anonymous recipient, before switching to a more typical take on a boy starting high-school. The usual archtypes are all present - there's the friendly and understanding English teacher, the now-estranged friend from middle-school, the jocks, the bitches, and the weirdos with passions for old English rock music, who Charlie falls in with. Then the emotional bombs start falling, splintering this comfortable facade. The casual, off-hand way in which Charlie reveals a key cause to his alluded to difficulties is a real jaw-dropping moment, and credit to Emma Watson for ably conveying the wave of shock that knocked the audience out of their seats. 

It is a moment, and there is at least one other, that could easily feel contrived - the emotional equivalent to jump-scares in horror films - but the occasional oblique references to trouble pasts means they felt earned and justified, rather than being a simple Nicholas Sparks-style and-then-he-gets-cancer deus ex machina. 

Of the three main characters it is Patrick who is by far the most entertaining - witty, protective, humourous and camp - and while Sam may be a bit bland at times, all three character arcs are individually satisfying but are also woven together perfectly, with each characters' own changing circumstance and emotions having a knock-on effect with the other two. I did feel that perhaps some of the ways that Sam and Patrick were marked out as outsiders were a bit forced, for instance the appropriation of British rock music in service to outsider-cool was gimmicky. No points for guessing which band takes pride of place - who else but The Smiths - and what with their appearance in (500) Days of Summer it's getting a bit wearying. As for Charlie, while his struggles with his past and his psyche form a solid core for the film, Perks falls into the traps of telling us his character traits without actually showing them: he is presented as a quiet socially-inept misfit, but by the end of the first day he has made friends, and his love of literature is used in a similar way to the music in that the film assumes that because he reads he must be interesting. The reality is that apart from the (admittedly essential) personal trauma that underpins the film and provides much of the drama, Charlie is not a particularly interesting character. However, the surround cast cover over this deficiency ably.

Despite these few quibbles The Perks of Being a Wallflower is hugely involving, gripping and heartstring-tugging that packs an emotional punch that few films of this genre can match. With so much psychological damage scattered liberally across the characters it could easily have become overly-harrowing, but the line is well-tread and the balance superb. It's not the easiest watch, but it is one of the most rewarding.

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Rian Johnson might not be a name to match the likes of Nolan, Cameron and Whedon quite yet, with only low budget noir indie-hit Brick (2005) and Brothers Bloom (2008) to his credit until now, but that hasn't stopped him pulling off this ambitious noir-sci-fi thriller with a panache equivalent of those aforementioned blockbuster behemoths. 

As with any story involving time-travel, the logic unravels if you look at it too closely, so here is some friendly advice from Austin Powers to remember when you go and see it. Essentially, it is 2044 and Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Joe, a 'looper' - an occupation in which the looper stands in a field with a gun waiting for an unfortunate target to be transported back in time, where upon arrival said target receives a chest-cavityful of high-velocity shotgun shells, administered with disinterested efficiency by the looper. It's easy work but it comes at a price: a an unheralded point in every looper's life their target will be their future self, 30 years older, transported back with enough gold to provide the looper with a comfortable lifestyle for 30 years, whereupon he is then sent back and killed; in Looper terminology this is known as 'closing the loop'. Like I said, don't think about it too much.

Of course, when Joe is faced with his future self (Bruce Willis), he hesitates, misses his shot and gets knocked out, allowing Bruce Willis to make his getaway. Failing to close one's loop is a heinous offence, so Joe has to not only track down and kill his future self, but also avoid the vengeful organisation he works for. Take that and add to it a young farm owner (Emily Blunt) with a mysteriously ominous child and you've got yourself a right tangled plotline.

Usually, sci-fi stories are allowed one or two leaps of faith upon which the sci-fi world is based: in Star Wars you've got the Force and intergalactic travel; in Children of Men you've got an infertile population; in 1984 you've totalitarianism taken to its greatest extreme. In Looper, you've got time travel and telekinesis. From these two Johnson creates a believable timeline - time travel is made illegal almost upon invention, and telekinesis - initially heralded as the next step of evolution - is actually quite rubbish, used mainly by desperate men trying to pick up women in bars by floating nickels around. Charles Xavier they are not. Essentially, despite containing two fantastical concepts, Looper tries hard to be plausible, and it succeeds, creating and maintaining a satisfyingly realistic sci-fi world.

JGL is great as always and in the last few years has become one of the most captivating and versatile leading men in Hollywood. Some subtle prosthetics on his lips and nose shape his face to look like a convincing younger version of Bruce Willis, and his voice and posture are spot on too. However young Joe is not a clone, rather the passage of time has given the two versions different sets of moral values and one of the greatest pleasures to be found in Looper is seeing how certain character traits are evident - or not evident - unchanged or altered by the 30 years that separate the two versions of Joe. Bruce Willis is standard Bruce Willis really - tough, grizzled, but with a deep love of those closest to him and complete disregard for anyone that gets in his way. The surprisingly few meetings between the two are great entertainment; what old Joe lacks in youthful vitality he makes up for in canniness. One of the best lines in the film is when young Joe quips "your face is on backwards". 

The supporting cast is excellent, too, with particular mention to Emily Blunt who plays a protective farmer with an unruly child, caught up in the film's tightening circles. Even better, though, is Noah Segan who plays a hapless enforcer called Kid Blue. His role is small and the character uncomplicated, but it's rare treat to have a someone so completely and hilariously incompetent as this guy. He seems to exist purely so Johnson can punish him, like a macabre puppeteer. 

I'm failing as a reviewer here. I don't do scores but if I did I wouldn't give Looper a 5, but I'm struggling to put my finger on why. Perhaps its that the time-travel stuff doesn't make sense (even though I'm doing my best to ignore that). Perhaps is that one of the characters is reveals to be unexpectedly powerful that didn't feel in keeping with the Looper world. Perhaps I wanted a slightly happier ending. However, I think it comes back to Joe. I just didn't connect with him as much as I would have liked. They've done a fantastic job with his appearance and mannerism, but he's just lacking a spark and the charm to lift the mood of this frequently thematically heavy film. He also turns into Rambo at one point, which felt a bit off.

But other than that, even though it's a month or two late, Looper is the film that this summer needed. Some have said it's like 2012's The Matrix; it's more like Inception in that it's sort of complicated (depending on how much time you spend trying to figure out the time travel stuff), has some great set-pieces, solid acting, and is a wholly original sci-fi film.