Wonder

Kindness, With the Training Wheels Off

I keep thinking about the first time August Pullman walks into that school hallway and everyone does the terrible, ordinary thing people do when they’re afraid: they stare. Not with cruelty, exactly. With the quick, involuntary freeze of a room noticing difference and not knowing where to put its eyes. Wonder understands that this is where most pain begins — not in some grand act of malice, but in the small social choreography of looking away too late, looking too long, laughing because somebody else did.

Stephen Chbosky, who made his name with The Perks of Being a Wallflower, has always been interested in the private weather of adolescence, and here he turns that interest toward a story built on a premise the movie knows could have become saccharine in less careful hands. It doesn’t dodge sentiment. But it does something trickier: it asks what kindness costs when it isn’t just a slogan.

What gives the film its shape is not plot so much as social pressure. Chbosky keeps returning to corridors, lunch tables, doorways, playground edges — places where children sort themselves into tribes with frightening speed. The camera often stays close to August, but not in the showy, woozy way of some prestige-injury movie trying to wring pity from every glance.

Instead, the framing gives us his daily tactical problem: how to cross a room without becoming an event. Jacob Tremblay, who had already carried Room with that unnerving mix of alertness and innocence, does something different here. He isn’t asked to be tiny and saintly.

He’s asked to be a kid with a brilliant mind, a deadpan sense of humor, and the burden of being seen before he’s known. His face — and yes, the makeup effects matter, because the film refuses to hide the condition it’s depicting — becomes part of the social grammar of the movie. People react to him before they speak to him, and Tremblay has to build a full personality out of the aftermath of those reactions.

Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson, playing Auggie’s parents, bring a more complicated note than the movie’s advertising suggested. Roberts, in particular, has a way of making maternal devotion look like labor rather than halo. She’s all clipped reassurances and sudden exhaustion; you can see the emotional bookkeeping in the set of her shoulders.