Friday, February 22, 2008

Movie review: Charlie Bartlett

Never, ever attack a drunk guy with a gun.

By John P. Meyer

Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin, taking the big screen by storm in his first bona fide leading role) is a rock star - in his dreams.

That's the way the movie begins: with Charlie, sitting in the headmaster's anteroom at his tony prep school, transporting himself via fantasy to center stage, facing a madly cheering audience full of young people chanting his name and applauding as he announces himself.

Back in real life, Charlie's being expelled from another in a series of exclusive (and expensive) boarding schools due - his mother is told - not to poor scholastic performance or problems with attendance, but rather to criminal malfeasance in relation to his dorm room-based industrial production of fake IDs - which, as his mom points out, are of exceedingly high quality.

As Charlie and his mom Marilyn Bartlett (Hope Davis) are chauffeured away from the brick-and-ivy premises, we get a pretty good sense of their relationship. Marilyn treats Charlie more like a peer than an adolescent offspring, and as we get to know Marilyn better we discover that there is much truth in this estimation: she herself is not particularly grown up in a fully-functional emotional sense, depending as she does upon her household servants and the family's on-call psychiatrist to guide her along life's twisty pathways. When she and Charlie perform a duet at the Steinway ("Those Were the Days"), they're so good at it that we know they've spent long hours practicing together.

"Those... were... the... DAAAAYS!"

In short, Charlie doesn't have an authority figure for a role model - he has an upper-crust, cultured, indulgent, libertarian-leaning pseudo-mom.

The only downside to Charlie's latest expulsion seems to be that he's worked his way through all available private schools on the Connecticut map, and thus will now be forced to attend a public one. Which he takes in self-possessed and weirdly confident stride, showing up on his first day resplendent in prep school blazer, much to the amusement of his astonished classmates. When Charlie inadvertently interrupts a drug deal in the boy's restroom, he receives a proper welcoming courtesy of tough guy Murph Bivens (Tyler Hilton, perfectly cast as a practitioner of casual locker room and stairwell brutality) in the form of a good old-fashioned commode dunking.

Murph and Charlie: business partners

On the bright side, Charlie meets and immediately takes a shine to budding thespian Susan Gardner (Kat Dennings, looking a lot like Rose McGowan's younger sister), whose signup sheet for the school play he immediately appends his John Henry to. Problem in the making, though: Susan's dad is the principal. (Uh oh.)

Principal Gardner (Robert Downey Jr., acting disaffected and cynically world-weary - or maybe not acting at all, come to think of it) doesn't really care for the role of moral exemplar and chief disciplinarian: he'd prefer to sit out on the deck behind his house navigating a radio-controlled scale model wooden runabout around the swimming pool while sipping (and periodically gulping) whiskey and sodas.

Meanwhile, Charlie - after a session with the family psychiatrist - receives a prescription for Ritalin, the ingestion of steadily increasing doses of which leads to a comic pants-free nocturnal confrontation with town police. It is through the doling out to classmates of pharmaceuticals - obtained via symptom-feigned sessions with a number of psycho-practitioners - that Charlie first sets foot upon the path to public school popularity.

What Charlie discovers about himself, even after the prescription drug business goes south (which, given its blatancy, is practically guaranteed), is that he's a natural born counselor in whom kids find it easy to confide. Furthermore, having been reared in an atmosphere of extreme tolerance, Charlie is apt to entertain the possibility - and convey it to his "patients" - that whatever failings they exhibit may turn out to be either meaningless in the grand scheme of things, or perhaps easily surmountable.

The bathroom counselor is in: Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings

Director Jon Poll's first Hollywood production hearkens back to any number of odd-kid-out-makes-good high school comedies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club and My Bodyguard; there's even a touch of Risky Business thrown in for good measure (up to and including the signature Tom Cruise sunglasses) - but this doesn't mean that nothing new emerges from scripter Gustin Nash's clever pen. What's refreshing about this story is how the characters are allowed to commune with their inner freaks through the agency of their restroom counselor, Charlie.

Take Murph, for instance. Once he comes to terms with the fact that there's more to Charlie than one of his usual whipping boys - and that, in fact, he may derive some benefit from collaborating rather than dominating - a whole new vista of possibilities opens up for him. The transformation that occurs in his character over the course of the movie is not so much miraculous as it is inevitable, given the circumstances.

"My dear young man, you must stop extolling the virtues of mind altering substances immediately."

It's something of a surreal treat to see Robert Downey Jr. expostulating on the evils of substance abuse, both because of the alcoholic propensities of his film character and the known history of his off-screen one. Hope Davis is simply irresistible as Charlie's flawed but completely self-actualized mom. Without a commanding performance from Anton Yelchin, however, all would be for naught. Fortunately, it turns out that Anton - born in Leningrad and emigrated to the U.S. along with his figure skating parents - has a range of talents that score the equivalent of straight 9.7s across the acting board (with maybe a 9.3 tossed out by the Lithuanian judge). This kid is charismatic and funny and fun to watch, and thus an excellent choice for the lead role. We trust it will be the first of many such.

IS THERE EVER A BAD TIME?: "Perhaps this would be a good time for an endowment." - Marilyn Bartlett, checkbook in hand, to private school headmaster

AND ALL'S WELL WITH THE WORLD: "Ritalin in the bag, dinner in the over. Love, Mom." - Marilyn's after-school note to Charlie

TORTURED ARTIST: "I kept getting my ass kicked by people like me." - Murph, re. why he gave up theater

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• SXSW movie review: Assassination of a High School President (March 18, 2008)
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• Arts > Movies / Film > Mainstream Movies