DirkH’s review published on Letterboxd:
Part of Dastardly Difficult December: film nr.76
I am fully aware I'm not part of this film's intended demographic, but still I expected much more from a film that seems to be getting a lot of love.
I'm tired of watching the stupendously dramatized woes of a bunch of fake, uninteresting, upper-middle class white kids. It is boring and hollow. Director Chbosky, who also wrote the novel and the screenplay, clearly loves his own material very much as he tries to smother his pedestrian plot in a sauce of false intellectualism and gives it a misplaced feel of importance.
It just isn't interesting or original enough, but they sure try to make it more than it is. The problem is, when you pull on grass, it doesn't make it grow any harder. Chbosky just tries too hard and forgets that great drama comes from a great story, not some predictable coming of age lark that beats and punches its characters with predictable blows in order to create a sense of drama.
There's not much wrong with the cast, they make ends meet, but they just don't have that much to work with. At one point the film seems to understand the predicament it is in. It's when one of the characters shouts: 'Oh my God, my life has turned into an After School Special!'
That was probably the only sentiment in this film I truly believed.