“Charlie Bartlett” (MGM)
The Student Doctor Is In
“Charlie Bartlett” is one of those movies about teens where they all act like adults and the adults all act like children. It supposedly has a point to make but it gets lost in translation. Anton Yelchin plays Charlie Bartlett and the film is all about him, but Yelchin is not charismatic enough to carry the film on his thin shoulders.
As the film opens Charlie Bartlett is being kicked out of yet another private school. He is a bright young man but he is also one of those people to whom popularity is everything. And if it takes getting into trouble to make him popular well that is a small price to pay.
His mother (Hope Davis) never gets too upset with Charlie’s escapades. She is more of a friend than a parent to her son and he takes advantage of her weaknesses. So it is with little fanfare that he next goes to public school. He does persuade his mother that it would not be good to be driven to school by the family chauffeur. He takes the school bus instead.
At school Charlie soon finds a way to become popular and that is by obtaining prescribed drugs for his new friends. They are actually prescriptions Charlie gets from his battery of psychiatrists and he passes them out as needed. He also serves as a counselor of sorts for the various problems the teens have.
Kat Dennings plays Susan, Charlie’s girlfriend. Robert Downey, Jr. plays her father who is also the principal of the high school. He is an alcoholic of sorts and a single parent to Susan. All of the adults in this movie have hang-ups that keep them from giving guidance to the teens.
The film is rated R for profanity, violence, brief nudity and drug use.
Yelchin is a very talented young actor. He has been around for some time even though he is only eighteen. He has been cast in the new “Star Trek” movie and that could be his breakthrough role. The role of Charlie Bartlett is the kind of role Downey would have been playing a few years back so it is full circle seeing the actor now in the father role of the film.
This is the kind of “small” movie that can be very good or very bad. “Charlie Bartlett” fits into the failure category. It doesn’t have enough star power to draw an audience in the doors, and it doesn’t have a quirky enough or entertaining story to get good word of mouth. It is just a here today gone tomorrow kind of film that might find a small audience on DVD.
I scored “Charlie Bartlett” a high school Harry 4 out of 10.
