Stars:
**
Rating: R for language, brief nudity and
drug use
Run
Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
“Charlie
Bartlett” has a foot in each door; low-budget clunker, jainky teen blockbuster
and mainstream indie hybrid. Whew.
Charlie
(Anton Yelchin) is a poor little rich boy, acting out his frustrations and
expelled from so many private schools that mom (Hope Davis) finally enrolls him
(gulp) at the local public.
Which only
fuels the flames as Charlie – a Good Samaritan at heart – comes to the aid of
the Western Summit High students with armchair counseling and prescription
drugs to attend his cheap advice.
Ritalin,
Prozac, Xanax – Charlie is a walking, talking pharmacy. In addition to his
burgeoning student body clientele Charlie also develops a crush – on the
principal’s daughter (Kat Dennings as Susan Gardner).
It’s a
matter of time before Charlie is ruling the school and his shenanigans come to
the attention of Principal Gardner (Robert Downey, Jr.), a single dad with a
closet drinking problem and a slim grasp on reason.
There are
only so many comic moments to be wrung from washroom confessionals and campus insurgence
and the weak scripting can’t support them. The teen rebel cliché has been done
to death and done better but a handful of performances nearly save the day; Yelchin
and Dennings brimming with something akin to adolescent integrity and Downey,
well let’s just say I’d be rapt watching him read the phone book aloud.
Banal
bromides are tossed about with reckless abandon (‘what you do in this life
matters!”) and core messages are clumsy. Bottom line it’s a lightweight outing
heavy on convention.