The idea behind Charlie Bartlett—a Ferris Bueller for the ‘00 decade!—is interesting enough, but the filmmakers wanted more. So they threw too many ideas at the wall to see which ones would stick, but most don’t. Although inventive and occasionally charming, the movie is too scattered and uneven to be satisfying.
Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is a 17-year-old kid from an absurdly privileged home, replete with a chauffeur, an overly smiley pill-popping mom (Hope Davis) and the boredom of being a rich teenager. Kicked out of the last possible private school for a fake-ID press, Charlie ends up at one of those public schools that only exist in movies, with green rolling grounds, imposing entrance halls and carefully defined cliques. Naturally, he wants to fit in, and so becomes the de facto psychiatrist for the kids in his high school by prescribing the pills he gets from his own psychiatric visits. He gains popularity and dates the daughter of the principal, but at a price, obviously.
Directed by Jon Poll, Charlie has some inventive bits, and the scenes of him on Ritalin are hysterically surreal. But once Charlie has it made at school, the film doesn’t know what to do next and becomes scattered in its tone and goals before hurriedly wrapping things up at the very end.
Aside from the usual unrealistic points (how does Charlie’s shrink not notice what’s going on? Does anyone do homework in this school?), there’s the problem of Charlie himself. Super rich, super intelligent, kind to people but also willing to rip them off, he never seems like a person that everyone would like so much. Yelchin is charismatic and slightly talented, making you like the kid for a while, but ultimately there’s nothing there. Even in the deeply “emotional” scenes showcasing his vulnerability, he still puts on a front. Without believing in Charlie, we can’t get much out of this movie.
Charlie doesn’t earn the emotions it tries to showcase, and when things take a turn for the melodramatic, the stakes don’t seem real. Robert Downey, Jr., as the principal (with substance issues strangely reminiscent of his real-life struggles) of Charlie’s school, doesn’t get to do much except mope, and his story seems shoehorned into a movie that just wants to celebrate Charlie. There are some interesting points to be made about high school kids in the information age, and about teenagers and medication—“connecting teens and pharmaceuticals is like opening a lemonade stand in the desert,” Charlie observes—but Charlie, running back and forth between overdramatized reality and madcap high school fantasy, can’t stay still long enough to make them.
