Whether you’re talking about the film or its eponymous hero, it’s genuinely hard to know how to respond to Charlie Bartlett. There aren’t many teen comedies about expelled private schoolboys who win favour in a new state school by providing counselling and mind-altering drugs to their peers from a graffitied toilet cubicle. Then again, there’s probably a reason for that.
Fittingly for the tale of a self-appointed shrink-cum-pharmacist, Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is a schizophrenic character, charming and insufferable in (fairly) equal parts. Even when his performance borders on the unendurably hyperactive, there is real conviction in Yelchin’s lead turn, and he is blessed with charisma and deadpan timing beyond his years. Unfortunately he is let down by the film’s superficial quirkiness, which is quickly buried under a landslide of stock characters and predictable plot twists. Sure enough, Charlie has a hard time at his (quelle surprise) hostile and chaotic state high school for all of 15 nanoseconds, before his irrepressible charm wins over everyone from the school bully to the principal’s hot-goth daughter. If only he can bond with his new girlfriend’s sceptical father, lead his fellow students in an anti-establishment revolt and confront his own inner demons before we all die of acute déjà vu poisoning! Spoiler alert: he can.
Despite occasional humorous moments between Charlie and his barking mother (‘Ritalin in the bag, dinner in the oven!’ reads a typical note from mother to son), director John Poll’s attempts to reorientate the high school comedy genre fall flat. At times his observations of teenage angst are so vacuous as to border on the offensive, and the film touches with ludicrous levity on issues such as teen suicide, prescription drug dependence and sexual insecurity. In a crowded marketplace of increasingly self-aware coming-of-age odysseys (Juno, Superbad et al.), Charlie Bartlett suffers badly by comparison. Perhaps, like Bartlett and his troubled peers, it is kindest to diagnose the film as having serious identity issues; while masquerading as the offspring of Rushmore and Ferris Bueller, it is ultimately far closer to being the bastard lovechild of American Pie and Analyze This. And there’s no cure for that.
