Charlie Bartlett Review
by [email protected] (sdo230 AT gmail DOT com)February 22nd, 2008
Charlie Bartlett
a little review by Sam Osborn of www.TheMovieMammal.com
Somebody asked Jon Poll, the first-time director of Charlie Bartlett, how he'd chosen the script as his first project. "Well," he said, "I read about a hundred scripts and narrowed it down to about two. The first was Charlie Bartlett, obviously. And the other was Juno." He was confused when the audience laughed. He said, "What? What's so funny?" Nobody could tell him, or had the heart to tell him, that he'd made the wrong choice.
Charlie Bartlett is a fine movie, but it's not "the love song to teenagers" that Mr. Poll hails it as. It's a film about kids that's written by adults. And though this is usually the case, the best stories about youth understand their subjects as their peers would. Think Tina Fey's playful satirizing of the high school experience with Mean Girls, or Noah Baumbach's understanding of divorce and brotherhood in The Squid and the Whale. With Charlie Bartlett we get the feeling that it was written by the parents. And maybe that's why the parents' sub-plots ring more clearly than the teenagers'. Robert Downey Jr. as Principle Gardner and Hope Davis as Charlie's mom are both broken characters, struggling to stay afloat as their children stir the waters they swim in. The main story, in which Charlie (Anton Yelchin) finds popularity in bathroom-stall psychology and prescription drug dealing is more of a clever riff on Ferris Beuller's Day Off than a smart swing at the Ridalin and Zoloft-dazed generation of teenagers today.
-www.TheMovieMammal.com
Charlie Bartlett: Directed by Jon Poll. Written by Gustin Nash. Starring Anton Yelchin, Kat Dennings, and Robert Downey Jr. Rated R for language, drug use, and brief nudity.
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