'Charlie Bartlett' follows 17 year old rich boy loner, Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yechlin). He doesn't have any friends and gets kicked out of numerous private schools. He is addicted to trouble and challenging authority. The main point behind that is that his father was arrested for tax evasion, sending his mother into a manically depressed state. Charlie was then forced to take care for his mother thus having no one to look after himself, he was an adult before he even became a teenager. You later find out that he hates his father for this, stealing his childhood.
Charlie is kicked out of his last private school, the reason this time is for making fake ID's, he is then sent to a public school. Right when he arrives, you see the typical clicks in an all too fake montage, the pot heads, skaters, jocks and outcasts. He is greeted by no one, except a mentally unstable mongoloid named, Len Arbuckle. He becomes friends with Len and people start to notice that Charlie is not like them. You are then exposed to other characters, Principal Gardnes (Robert Downey Jr.), his daughter Susan (Kat Dennings) and the school bully Murphy Bivens (Tyler Hilton). Charlie runs with an unusual crowd, that is for sure.
Next in the story is a loner named Kip Crombwell (Mark Rendall) who asks Charlie if he can get him prescription drugs after a fiasco involving a school dance and Ritalin. Charlie of course agrees, all he really cares about is becoming popular and fitting in for once. The word then gets out about this little drug cartel Charlie has in his power. He and Murphy start to to get medication for all the kids at the school. Charlie runs a little psychiatrist office out of one of the boys' bathrooms. He asks the kids their problems, then recites them to his own psychiatrist thus getting the drugs.
The story is good, it lacks certain qualities that just don't seem believable, but then again this is a high school comedy, those traits aren't required. Anton Yechlin is great as Charlie Bartlett, it shows that this young kid has potential. I envisioned the film to be this dark teen comedy, but it turned into a quirky film about the high school body and drug abuse. The two surprisingly worked damn well together.
Hope Davis plays Charlie's neurotic mother. Her performance is the best in the film. She is so estranged from reality by her own medication that she seems like Charlie's daughter. She plays with the same quirkiness Kim Darby did as John Cusack's mother in the film 'Better Off Dead...'. The other adult in the film is Robert Downey Jr. He plays an alcoholic school principal. He also is a fan of boats. Look for some great scenes with him and Yechlin in the end of the movie.
All in all this a great representation of what high school is like for certain kids in their certain clicks, it tackles these topics with witty dialog and humor. For the most part it works, but sometimes in the few serious scenes, the shouldn't have flipped the humor switch back on so fast.
See this movie Friday, it's the first great movie of the year.
MY RATING: 8.0/10.0
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