Book vs. Movie: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

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I realize I am YEARS behind on this post, seeing as the book was published in 1999 and the movie came out in 2012. But I just got around to both recently. I wanted to write a blog post similar to the one I wrote for A Wrinkle in Time.

Here are many of the things that the movie got wrong that would not have been difficult to fix to be more authentic to the book (in no particular order):

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1. Sam is supposed to have long hair. Charlie specifically mentions how pretty her long hair is in the book. In the movie, Emma Watson (playing Sam) does have long hair during the clips when she is performing the Rocky Horror Picture Show, so why not have her look like that during the whole film?

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 2. When Patrick (played by Ezra Miller) imitates the shop teacher, in the book the teacher actually finds is amusing and doesn't get mad. Also, at the end of the movie, Patrick's senior prank is painting all of the tools in the shop pink. That did not happen in the book.

3. At one point Sam makes a terribly distasteful joke about bulimia ("I love bulimia!"). This is horrible. The joke is not in the book, so why add such a disgusting line to the movie?

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4. The boy that Charlie's sister is dating is called "ponytail Derek" in the movie. Do we actually ever know the name of the boy she's dating in the novel? And in the book Charlie tells his teacher that the boyfriend hit his sister, and then the parents find out; Charlie keeps the secret in the movie.

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 5. In the movie, Charlie's teacher, Mr. Anderson (played by Paul Rudd), is married, but in the book, Mr. Anderson only has a live-in girlfriend.


6. In the book, I imagined that the jacket Patrick gives to Charlie for Christmas is more of a tweed, writer's jacket, and less of just a boring black suit.

7. The film left out the entire scene when Charlie takes his sister to the abortion clinic. BUT that is a deleted scene in the special features! They did film it, so why not include it?! (I will say the other deleted scenes were nothing special and I'm glad they were cut.)

8. Charlie never visits his Aunt Helen's grave site in the movie, but he mentions it more than once in the book. 

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9. I thought Mary Elizabeth (played by Mae Whitman) got into Yale, not Harvard.

I am happy to say that most of these changes are superficial and don't change the plot of the story. But if you're going to make a film based on a book, why not try to be as true to the book as possible?