An age-old complaint of teenagers everywhere is that no one “gets” them, no one listens to their problems. That’s probably because most psychologists and such are adults who have long ago lost the ability to see the world through teenage eyes. So wouldn’t it be better if teens had a peer counselor to talk to, someone their own age who is going through the exact same things they are?
That’s the basic premise of Charlie Bartlett, a 2007 comedy starring Anton Yelchin and Robert Downey, Jr. I really liked Yelchin’s work in Alpha Dog, and have been a fan of Robert Downey Jr. since the 1980s, so I decided to give this film a try despite the mostly lukewarm reviews I read about it. Unfortunately, even these two terrific actors couldn’t save Charlie Bartlett from itself.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Charlie Bartlett (played by Yelchin) is a 17-year-old misfit with a penchant for getting kicked out of private schools. His wealthy mother Marilyn (Hope Davis) is anything but a disciplinarian, so she thinks nothing of simply moving Charlie from one school to another, even when public school becomes the only alternative. Charlie’s father is in prison, and serves merely as a source of angst and embarrassment for Charlie.
Charlie is the type of kid who wears suits to school, quickly making him the target of resident bully Murphey Bivens (Tyler Hilton). When Charlie tires of getting his head dunked in the toilet and getting his beatings filmed for YouTube, he decides to try a different tack: he talks to Charlie about the source of his anger. Then he makes a deal with Charlie: they’ll go into business together selling prescription meds to kids at the school.
Charlie sets up shop in a bathroom stall, listens to kids spew their problems, looks up their symptoms in psychology textbooks, and then goes to his mother’s long list of shrinks pretending to have the symptoms in question. Once he gets the ’scripts from his doctors, he brings them back to Murphey to divvy up for the kids.
The racket is a resounding success, and Charlie becomes one of the most popular boys in school. But Principal Gardner (Downey Jr.) eventually realizes what’s going on, and moves in to break up Charlie’s business enterprise. Gardner has additional motivation to take Charlie down, considering the fact that Charlie is sleeping with Gardner’s daughter Susan (Kat Dennings).
The film then wends its way towards the inevitable confrontation between Gardner, Charlie, and Susan, before arriving at the happy ending that Hollywood demands.
My Reaction: As I said, I thought the premise for Charlie Bartlett sounded pretty good, and theoretically should have presented the filmmakers with lots of opportunities for laughs. After all, the film was marketed as a comedy, so I was expecting to laugh at least a little bit during the story.
But that didn’t happen. The only scenes that were clearly supposed to be funny (for example, when Charlie and Susan are singing in dumb accents while playing the piano) just came off as out of place and ridiculous, while the rest of the time it seemed as though the writers actually wanted to treat the subject matter seriously — except for the drug dealing part, which was quickly brushed under the rug thanks to a principal that was willing to overlook everything. Yeah, right.
I didn’t like how they treated the attempted suicide so blithely either. I mean, there are definitely kids out there who try to swallow handfuls of pills because of all the problems they have, and I think the film does a disservice by making light of the situation. Charlie didn’t get in trouble for selling Kip drugs and everything will be fine as long as Kip can put on his original play at the school? Um, okay….
Overall, Charlie Bartlett is doomed by an identity crisis as the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether to treat this as a comedy or a drama. As a result, the lighthearted parts come off as out of place while the more “serious” aspects are dealt with much too casually. I give the film just 4.0 stars out of 10.