The Wright Times

Issue date: 3/1/08 Section: Arts & Culture

Media Credit: Sidney Kimmel Entertainment

The movie opens with a stadium crowd chanting, "Charlie, Charlie, Charlie!" The title character strides onstage and gives a Tony Robinson speech in his best motivational jargon. Then dubious hero, Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin), abruptly returns to his psychiatrist's office. It's a recurring dream and it's in this office that the movie releases its primary message: all anyone wants in this world is acceptance for who they are, and connection with others. Now magnify this a thousand times if you're in high school.

Charlie Bartlett, kicked out of every private school he's ever attended, finds himself attending public school and not fitting in, but even worse the target of bullies. Charlie soon discovers his peers are secretly crying for help. The popular, as well as the outcasts, find themselves coming to Charlie for psychological and pharmaceutical help. The uncredential, underage shrink sets up shop in a boys bathroom and with the help of his former bully, becomes the toast of his new school. The R rating, because of the drug content, seems extreme. But essentially, Charlie is a pusher, although an amiable one, and no pusher is harmless. This confuses the audience, who believe Charlie is doing the right thing , but he's not.

At home, Charlie takes care of his perpetually high, emotionally mixed-up mother played by Hope Davis, who unknowingly sends him to the shrinks prescribing the pills. Along the way Charlie finds love with the striking, loopy Susan (Kat Denning), daughter of the school's alcoholic, divorced, blasé Principal (Robert Downey Jr.), who at first is not concerned about the relationship, later becoming obsessed with it. Downey's performance is right on, making the audience squirm with awkward torture as the average father who finds himself slowly slipping from functional alcoholic to sloppy drunk. Meanwhile Denning never gets the chance to play more than the mediocre sidekick.

At times the film becomes preachy and confusing about which path to choose. Charlie often comes off as one-dimensional. Director Jon Pole, Meet the Parents and Austin Powers editor, wanted to say something more, but never quite got there. At one point, Charlie tells the football hero, "I think one of our duties as teenagers is to occasionally mess with our parents." But it's clear that Charlie, although not the perfect child, never messes with his.

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