Charlie Bartlett

[KLAXXON]

At the start of CHARLIE BARTLETT, the title character (Anton Yelchin) is expelled from yet another elite boarding school. This incident is just one in a long chain of expulsions resulting from Charlie's eccentric behaviour. His high-strung, heavily medicated mother (Hope Davis) persuades him to enrol in public school, where he wears a prep school blazer and an all-too-eager look on his face. When he meets school bully Murphey (Tyler Hilton), who shoves his head down a toilet bowl, his dreams of acceptance are quickly crushed. But the young entrepreneur soon finds another use for the same bathroom stall, setting up shop as the school's unlikely shrink to his troubled fellow students, who line up for unorthodox counselling and medication that Charlie gets from his family's on-call psychiatrist. Charlie's the talk of the school until he catches the eye of the depressed Principal Gardner (Robert Downey Jr.).














Expelled from private school, genial misfit Charlie (Yelchin) is placed in the public system. His background sets him apart until he finds a bond with the other kids - including the disillusioned headmaster’s (Downey Jr.) daughter - in dysfunction. Soon, he’s the school’s unofficial pharmacist.





Charlie Bartlett can’t have been an easy pitch. Like the character, the movie has its work cut out: how to make a (very) rich kid sympathetic and likeable? It’s a challenge first-time filmmaker Jon Poll has struggled hard to overcome, but, at some stage, he either gave up or had the rug pulled from under him.

Initial inroads into Charlie’s plight are good. Despite his life of privilege, the boy doesn’t have the things he really wants - the things every teenager wants - security and popularity. He (quite literally) dreams of standing before crowds of adoring peers, and operates crafty, yet daft, schemes to win their approval - schemes which have resulted in his systematic expulsion from every private school in the area.

After we’re introduced to his eccentric mother - Hope Davis in a role that could have gone spectacularly wrong, but becomes a marvel of subtle comedy in her capable hands – Charlie heads for state school, blazered and clutching an attaché case: obviously gearing up to have the shit kicked out of him. So far, so predictable. It's when Charlie uses his resourcefulness to deftly take control of his situation that things swiftly pick up.

Charlie Bartlett is at its most interesting when it nudges the boundaries of good behaviour; measuring Charlie’s desire for acceptance against the dangers of, say, selling prescription drugs to his classmates. Of course, your enjoyment of these scenes may well depend on your politics, but there’s no denying that watching a toff have an adverse reaction to a dose of Ritalin is highly amusing.

It’s unfortunate that Poll doesn’t push his characters further into such promising territory. The good work unravels when conflicts begin to be resolved by contrived, convenient screenwriting; while the always reliable Robert Downey Jr. is criminally wasted, waiting for a big scene that never arrives. A horrible sense of ’happy ending syndrome’ kicks in, and with it any hopes of Poll matching the likes of Wes Anderson quickly evaporate. It means that a good film falls short - considerably, in the end - of greatness. There are plenty of good qualities in Charlie; it just needed to apply itself a little more.



After a strong start, the story ceases to challenge itself and its characters, offering easy options and a Prozac-soft finish.









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