This rollicking story of a rich kid whose
wildly successful bid for popularity has him
playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire
high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs
between upstart Anton Yelchin and alcoholic
principal Robert Downey Jr. that could fuel
a chemistry lab.
Yelchin’s adolescent Charlie Bartlett is an
adorable, sincere, and slick popularity-seeker.
who is sent off to public school, sporting a
Latin-mottoed blazer and leather attache case.
He soon starts dating Susan (Kat Dennings),
the daughter of Principal Gardner (Downey),
whose move from iconoclastic history teacher
to repressive bureaucrat has already driven
him deep into the bottle.
And though the filmmakers no doubt believe
that carelessly administered prescription drugs
can be harmful, the sight of Charlie bouncing
off the walls on Ritalin provides a joyous
wallow in vintage Sennett-style overcranking.
Charlie Bartlett makes a strong case for a solid
writer-director split, since Nash’s sententiousleaning
script, passing through the anarchic
energy of Poll’s direction, creates precisely
balanced anomalies – like Charlie himself, and
those lovely, multilayered exchanges between
Downey and Yelchin.
*Screening with the short film, The Sound of People. (Simon Fitzmaurice
/ Ireland / 7 minutes) A moment in the life of an eighteen year old boy,
staring into the face of his own death.
