Charlie Bartlett - Preview
Preview by Jack Foley
SOME films take a little pushing to get their brilliance noticed by the mainstream. Juno is a prime example of a hip, clever and emotionally engaging indie movie making it big – and deservedly so.
But for every success, there’s plenty of undiscovered gems that fall by the wayside, such as Igby Goes Down, The Savages and Brick. They’re the films that genuine film fans are proud to have on their radar, while the mainstream goes blissfully along with current trends, or the “film of the moment” such as Norbit (we’re still reeling from the fact it made No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic).
Anyways, I digress. This is about the films to put on your radar over the coming months and Charlie Bartlett is firmly one of those. It’s a smart college movie, with a cracking cast, an incendiary script and laughter and emotion by the bucketload. For sure, it’s about a disaffected, mixed-up teen, and yes it involves a right of passage (on one occasion). But it’s not aimed at the low-brow or the obvious and delights as a result.
Expelled from yet another private school for his blossoming, though illegal, entrepreneurial activities, wealthy teenager Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) finds himself at regular High School. His smart, geeky appearance gets him a first day beating from the school bully so his overly medicated mother (Hope Davis) calls in the family psychiatrist to help him out.
An opportunity not to be missed, Charlie sets himself up as the school agony aunt, dishing out advice and prescription drugs, courtesy of the family shrink, from the school rest rooms.
His charm, charisma and access to medication soon starts to win him new friends as well as the attentions of the principal’s daughter (Susan Gardner), much to the annoyance of the Principal (Robert Downey Jr.) a man battling his own demons.
Directed by Jon Poll, from a script by Gustin Nash, Charlie Bartlett is well worth adding to anyone’s must-see list. Downey Jr is superb and in Yelchin and Gardner we have two young stars to keep an eye on in the future.
Yelchin, in particular, looks to have a very bright future. Having previously appeared in the films Alpha Dog and Fierce People, as well as seminal rights of passage TV shows such as NYPD Blue and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Yelchin – whose father, Viktor Yelchin, and his mother, Irina, were a successful pair of professional figure-skaters in Leningrad – will next be seen alongside Susan Sarandon in Middle of Nowhere (for director John Stockwell), Roland Joffe’s You And I (Finding tATu) and – most crucially – JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek movie (as Pavel Chekov).
Among Charlie Bartlett‘s fans in America were Variety, which wrote: “Rollicking story of a rich kid whose wildly successful bid for popularity has him playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs between Anton Yelchin and Robert Downey Jr. could fuel a chemistry lab.”
And the Hollywood Reporter, which stated: “Yelchin delivers one of those performances that pop eyes.”
USA Today, meanwhile, felt that “Charlie Bartlett is a refreshingly entertaining character study that refuses to dumb down its youthful cast or bury their concerns in service of a catchy soundtrack”.
And The New York Observer, whose critic gleefully stated: “I salute the inventiveness, imagination and cockeyed teenage humor in a delightful new movie called Charlie Bartlett. It picks up where Juno left off.”
Charlie Bartlett is currently scheduled for a UK release in May 2008.