Yet both want him to stand up for himself, and to be part of a community. Roberts and Wilson make a compelling team they play the Pullmans as supremely sensitive, loving parents who have the occasional tug-of-war spat about what’s best for their special son. They know they can’t shield him from the world forever, and they have no desire to. But now that he’s 10, she and Auggie’s dad, Nate ( Owen Wilson), have made the decision to send him to middle school. “Wonder” is an honest feel-good movie, but it lacks the pricklier edges of art.Īuggie has been home-schooled by his mother, Isabel ( Julia Roberts), in their cozy Brooklyn brownstone. At the same time, the film never upsets the apple cart of conventionality. It’s a very tasteful heart-tugger - a drama of disarmingly level-headed empathy that glides along with wit, assurance, and grace, and has something touching and resonant to say about the current climate of American bullying. “Wonder” is a movie that belongs in their company. Peter Bogdanovich did it in “Mask” (1985), his straight-up tale of a teenager with a face of scowling strangeness who came to embrace the person he was. David Lynch did it in “The Elephant Man” (1980), his shrewdly restrained, underbelly-of-London Gothic horror weeper, which revealed John Merrick, beneath his warped and bubbled flesh, to be a figure of entrancing delicacy. Yet maybe because the dangers of grotesque sentimentality loom so large, a handful of filmmakers, over the years, have made a point of taking on stories like this one and treading carefully around the pitfalls.

Movies about people with dramatic disfigurements run a high risk of being mawkish and manipulative. Any thoughts that he’s ugly, or odd, are really in the eye of the beholder. (He likes to walk around in a toy astronaut helmet that conceals him and feeds his dreams.) His face, which looks youthful and old at the same time, is jarring the first time you see it, but the more you take in his innocent if slightly askew elfin features, the more his soul shines through. He’s just an ordinary kid whose looks take a bit of getting used to.Īuggie is a science geek who loves “Star Wars” and Minecraft, ice cream and X-Box sports games he’s fueled by all-American fantasies of going to outer space. His left eye tugs downward as if a teardrop were falling from it his ears are bulbs of flesh, and his face is framed by a pinkish ring of scar tissue. That said, he’s not the Phantom of the Opera. Auggie Pullman (Jacob Tremblay), the central character in Stephen Chbosky’s “ Wonder,” is a brainy 10-year-old boy with a sweet high voice and a congenital facial deformity, whom numerous corrective surgeries have left looking like a cherub after a car accident.

Wonder in the ordinary movie