Charlie Bartlett left me utterly speechless. This movie isn’t astoundingly good; it isn’t love-to-hate it bad either. It is rather dull and lifeless, save the energy it’s tried to suck out of other icon high school misfit films. And so I’m rather hard pressed to go on about such an unimpressive trip to the theater; maybe that alone is all one needs to know about a movie. In case it isn’t, well, here it goes.

Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin), a rather inexplicably wealthy teenage oddball, has been kicked out of one private prep school after another for pulling naughty stunts like fake ID dealing. His flighty, strangely flirtatious mother (Hope Davis) reluctantly sends Charlie (in his standard crest embroidered blazer) to the halls of the local public school. Tormented by the resident bully, Murphy, (Tyler Hilton) and cold shouldered by the rest of his fellow students, the always resourceful Charlie prescribes his own popularity by getting his classmates to pop pills. Having little use for his personal psychiatrist, Charlie sets up his own office in the grubby, graffiti covered boys’ bathroom and becomes the school’s most popular intermediary psychotherapist.

This is one of those scripts that I honestly, for the life of me, cannot believe ever sold. Of course, Anton Yelchin puts up a good fight the whole way through with what seems to be a lot of improved humor and accented voices. But he has terribly little material to work with; the written humor in this film is sparse, at best. Performance alone can’t support a movie, especially when the entire plot and premise have very little grounding in reality. It is very hard to believe that even Connecticut public school children have a difficult time legitimately accessing prescription medication, and Charlie Bartlett’s penchant for dishing out personal advice isn’t really clever enough to carry an entire feature length film.

The terrible turmoil in Charlie’s world is that his love interest’s (Kat Dennings) father is his high school’s alcoholic principal, and Charlie’s fight to help his classmates tear down new surveillance cameras puts him at odds when it comes to getting the girl. Are security cameras such a big deal that a riot surrounding them constitutes the climax of even a teenaged film? The entire screenplay of Charlie Bartlett is so incredibly stale, that Yelchin’s good acting actually works against the entire effect. There seems to be something really wrong with Charlie Bartlett; he is unstable, unpredictable, antiauthority, and overly egotistical, yet his character doesn’t have any real setup that warrants his personality (other than an unseen father incarcerated for tax evasion.)

There were some really great young actors in his film; Kat Dennings looks stellar in that seductive shade of red lipstick she wears in every scene, Tyler Hilton really put away the boy band look and took on the bully feel, and Dylan Taylor probably sold the stole the show as Charlie’s hysterical, very special first friend.

In the end though, Charlie Bartlett is part Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, part Rushmore, and probably part a conglomeration of other fragments snatched from various teenaged comedies. But it isn’t any part Charlie Bartlett (whatever that is or was intended to be.) In short, this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be; Charlie Bartlett has too many personalities and there isn’t a pill in the world that can smooth it over into something…good.

Liz Licorish
LizFlix@ElitesTV.com
Published: February 23, 2008