Charlie Bartlett’s War
Fast times, teen therapy
A goodteenage
comedy should nail the particulars of high school life, a purgatory
period that remains rife with satirical potential generation after
generation. It should also satirize the society that promulgated the
purgatory. By those measures, Charlie Bartlett is a success. The adult problems it spoofs are magnified and distorted in the funhouse mirror of teen life.
In Charlie Bartlett, everyone
is troubled and seeking medication, whether licitly or illicitly,
pharmaceutical or otherwise. Their problems, however, aren’t resolved
through pills or liquor, but only deferred. Sometimes the druggy
therapy engenders its own problems.
Enter the movie’s titular
protagonist. Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is a beaming teenager with a
sparkling smile, scion of a super-rich family with brains to spare. His
problem, stemming from growing up almost exclusively with his mom (Hope
Davis), is that he just isn’t well liked by his peers. As a result of
his need to feel loved, or at least important, he conceived a series of
illegal schemes that resulted in expulsion from the private academies
he attended.
We meet him as he is being politely booted for
making counterfeit ID cards. As the chauffeur drives the Mercedes back
to the gated mansion, mom, coolly disapproving yet nonetheless
supportive, announces that no alternative remains but public school.
Drawing from a pharmacy of Xanax and Zoloft, he begins to hold therapy sessions in the lavatory, prescribing pills to treat the depression and anxiety disorders of classmates. He becomes the big man on campus. But his pills nearly kill a suicidal depressive boy.
All the while mom washes down her Prozac with Chablis and the school principal (a wonderfully conflicted Robert Downey Jr.) deadens the pain of his life with whiskey. He was happy teaching history, but was promoted beyond his level, and has an angry exwife and a cutie daughter Susan (Kat Dennings) who won’t listen. When Susan casts her eyes on Charlie, who is rapidly becoming the school’s ringleader, dad is nonplussed.
Susan and Charlie share something beyond sexual attraction. Both have been wounded by the loss of a parent, not to death but to adult misbehavior. Charlie Bartlett is a cleverly subversive comedy that casts a revealing light on the troubles of teens and adults alike. All are stumbling along in the dark with the blind in charge of the blind. Most are capable of finding solutions and making choices they did- n’t know they had. The cheeky consulting room Charlie sets up in the lavatory with conversations from adjoining stalls suggests a confessional. Charlie is at his best when he isn’t pushing nostrums or pills but when, like a wise counselor, he listens to his patient and prescribes sound advice.
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