Charlie Bartlett

MOVIE #1,458 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.19.24 This might be the least realistic portrayal of American public high schools ever put on film. I found myself starting and stopping threads that picked apart the flaws with this movie's myriad themes and plotting. But there's almost too many to grapple with. The film is about a wealthy teenager (Anton Yelchin) who begins to dispense therapeutic advice and prescription drugs to the student body at his new high school in order to become popular after getting expelled from private school. Kat Dennings plays his classmate love interest and Robert Downey Jr. plays her father, who’s also the alcoholic principal of the school. There's a decent idea here but the story structure and script are extremely flawed. For example, Principal Downey says “being popular doesn't matter, it's what you do with that popularity” but the kid is only popular because of what he did?

The jig is up heading into the third act and the plot shifts with Charlie helping his new friends without the aide of pharmaceuticals, like assisting the depressed kid to get his original play (“Hell Comes with Your Own Locker” lol) produced. It also turns out all the kids who went to Charlie for drugs don't care about the drugs, they just want to talk to ole Charlie, teenage psychologist and friend to all. This is the biggest stretch of the movie and basically obliterates its point about prescription drugs (or reveals that it didn't have much to say about it after all).

Compared to other teen comedies of the era, this is high art (although it was part of a minor trend alongside films like Juno that were trying to do something other than have minors fuck a pie). Ultimately, this is a movie that begs you to have a lot of opinions on what it has to say, and maybe it's the passage of time that's rendered the subject matter less cutting, but I simply don't care all that much. It's a very odd capsule, a portrait of a weird moment in time (both in cinema and in America), featuring one of the few lead performances from a really talented actor who died young. That alone makes it intriguing, but it doesn't make it good.

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Charlie Bartlett is a 2007 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by Jon Poll. The screenplay by Gustin Nash focuses on a teenager who begins to dispense therapeutic advice and prescription drugs to the student body at his new high school in order to become popular.This was released on May 1, 2007 .