Wonder

“Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” This is one of the monthly “precepts” Auggie Pullman’s fifth-grade homeroom teacher shares with his students. It’s a nice rule, and yay for the vocabulary lesson of “precept.”

And just to be sure that no one has missed the fact that Wonder has not very subtly underlined this moral over and over again, Auggie will repeat it out loud for the audience at the film’s end.

I wish I felt worse about reacting churlishly to a movie that is all about reminding kids to be nice to people, and about insisting that bullying is bad. But Wonder is ham-handed, bashing us about the noggin with its themes and its messages until you want to scream, “Alright already, we get it!”

And it’s simultaneously so gentle and subdued as to be almost dramatically inert. That combination makes a weird middle ground for a movie to exist in, almost as if it simply doesn’t trust itself to tell its own story and be understood by its audience.

Or maybe the filmmakers took too much to heart the notion that kids need to be told the same thing a hundred times before it sinks in. I’m not sure that teaching dictum applies to drama the same way it might to, say, multiplication tables.

Wonder, based on the best-selling children’s novel by R.J. Palacio, might have trusted more that stories are their own lessons and do not require flashcard accompaniment.

The appeals to be nice and not bully are needed because 10-year-old Auggie is going to school for the first time as Wonder opens. He has been homeschooled by his mom, Isabel (Julia Roberts), because he suffers from facial deformities that have required numerous surgeries, including plastic surgery, to fix. (Auggie calls his condition “mandibulofacial dysostosis,” more commonly known as Treacher Collins syndrome and a cleft palate.)

It’s not clear, however, whether it’s the hospital stays that have kept him out of school or whether his mom and dad, Nate (Owen Wilson), have just been overprotective.

While his face is unusual, he’s still pretty cute – but of course kids have a remarkable ability to hone in like a laser on even the smallest difference in other kids, and Auggie remains an outcast and a target for quite a while in his new school.

Wonder seems as if it’s going to be purely Auggie’s story, but it takes sudden and almost jarring detours into the stories of others around him, including his older sister, Olivia, or “Via” (Izabela Vidovic), his new friend Jack (Noah Jupe), and even Via’s best friend, Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell).

These tangents – even when they are dropped just as suddenly as they get taken up – are meant to show us those hard battles that everyone else is fighting; Via, for instance, has always felt neglected by her parents because of all the attention that her little brother’s medical needs required.

That creates more problems than just narrative flow. From a thematic standpoint, Wonder posits that someone like Auggie, who is disabled or different, can serve as an inspiration for others to become better people.

The sibling jealousy element doesn’t help, even if it’s believable.

The very effective and empathetic young actor Jacob Tremblay, who was very moving as the captive child in Room, is very good as Auggie; even the makeup required to create Auggie’s facial deformities cannot hide the actor’s warmth and intelligence, and he makes Auggie a delightful kid, into a “wonder,” as his mother calls him. He’s lovable and totes around a protective helmet – not for physical safety so much as a disguise.

The other good news is that Wonder, the second feature from director Stephen Chbosky, avoids the sappiness that it could easily have wallowed in.

But some of the story’s simplicities fall into tired clichés about privilege and lack thereof: The rich kids at Auggie’s fancy new prep school are mostly awful; kind Jack is on a scholarship, and we presume that it’s Auggie’s disability that keeps him on the right side of niceness, even though he’s clearly a rich kid. (The Pullmans live in a massive brownstone in swanky Park Slope, Brooklyn.)

That’s a little off-putting, and misguided, when it comes to the intended take-home message: Having a disability doesn’t necessarily make someone nicer or better.

Putting Auggie on a pedestal isn’t as helpful or as kind as Wonder would seem to believe it is.

WONDER (2) • Directed by Stephen Chbosky • Starring Jacob Tremblay, Owen Wilson, Izabela Vidovic • Rated PG • 113 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Maya Cinemas