Take Ferris Bueller and add prescription drugs and you have Charlie Bartlett, an arch and intelligent teen comedy that might not have worked as well if Juno hadn't primed us for it.
Like that movie, Charlie
Bartlett features a preternaturally self-possessed teen hero and a spinny moral compass. It's also funny, though more from audacity than wisecracks.
When we meet Charlie (the appealing Anton Yelchin, most recently of Alpha Dog) we find out several things quickly. He's rich and pampered (he even has a private psychiatrist on call). His dad is a non-presence for reasons explained later. His mom, played with exquisite flakiness by Hope Davis, is a pill-popper and alcoholic (but the good kind).
And he has been kicked out of private school for forging IDs -- behaviour apparently linked to his fantasy of being popular, nay adored. In his fantasies, crowds of fellow teens are cheering him in his blue private-school blazer and he soaks up the acclaim from onstage.
That, and his last-resort enrolment in a public high school, set the stage for realizing his fantasy in a morally dubious way. Still wearing his blazer, Charlie attracts the malevolent attention of the school bully Murphey (Tyler Hilton) and takes the expected ass-kicking.
But years of analysis have made Charlie a de facto expert in psychology, and when it's time for Round Two with Murphey, he glibly talks the guy out of it with deft questions that cut straight to the bully's lack of self-esteem.
Charlie has another key card to play -- the ability to con any prescription drug out of his bored psychiatrist just by faking the right symptoms. So he enlists Murphey in a business proposition. What starts out at first as simply a drug-dealing scheme (there's a funny, if implausible, scene where an entire school dance is whacked out on Ritalin), morphs into an ad hoc psychiatric practice run out of a washroom (sort of a post-pubescent version of the one Lucy runs in Peanuts).
The discovery: teenagers -- even the seemingly most popular ones -- are invariably messed up and need a willing ear and good advice (and the appropriate medication to smooth out their symptoms).
The result: Charlie becomes the hallway hero he always dreamed of being, a phenomenon that disturbs the paranoid, depressed and alcoholic Principal Gardner (Robert Downey Jr.), who makes it personal when Charlie starts dating his drama-club president daughter (Kat Dennings).
The static between these two is what drags Charlie Bartlett into the realm of drama at key points. Unlike Jeffrey Jones' over-the-top comic portrayal of essentially the same character in Ferris Bueller, Downey plays Principal Gardner with all acting guns blazing, believably losing his stability as he imposes curfews and cameras (and ultimately goes postal) on his increasingly wilful student body.
For all its quirk, the script for Charlie Bartlett, by first-time feature writer Gustin Nash, seems drawn as if by gravity to a conventional last act -- something very much like a happy ending. It's the cast that really floats this boat, particularly Davis, Downey and Yelchin (whose equanimity cracks with skilful subtlety and believability when he finds out leadership has serious drawbacks).
There are great swaths of plot in Charlie Bartlett that seem unlikely. And yet, there's a likability to the character and a fair bit of thought to the premise and execution that make it one of the better teen movies in recent years.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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