Is Charlie Bartlett the Best Teen Movie Ever?
Charlie Bartlett, which stars Robert Downey Jr., my favorite actor, and Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings, two of my favorite young actors, and most of the case of Degrassi: The Next Generation, a television program that is near and dear to my heart, is kind of a perfect storm of Reihanness. Like a lot of you, I’m guessing, I always liked Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though perhaps less than you’d think. The thing about Bartlett is its extraordinary generosity and humaneness.
Much of what I know, or think I know, about “the kids these days” comes from friends who are on the frontlines, grad students and junior faculty who wrestle with a generation that craves the approval of elders to a surprising, alarming degree. We’ve all heard about “helicopter parents,” etc., but I’ve seen colleagues and friends with children fielding half a dozen calls from their kids. I mean, I’m sure some parents are indeed “helicopter parents,” and then there are the parents who are eager to fly away yet find themselves tethered to extraordinarily needy (and, in fairness, very loving) children.
So Bartlett, like all of these movies, represents wish-fulfillment. Charlie’s dad is mysteriously not-there, for reasons that only become clear about halfway in. He craves popularity, like most adolescents, yet he goes about getting it in a very strange way: yes, he schemes, but not to exclude, or to climb over others to get to the top of the food chain. Rather, he schemes to make himself indispensable by simply being kind, by listening to children who feel ignored or badly misunderstood.
Wow.
Charlie is, moreover, a lot more mature than many of the adults around him, including the likable yet half-shattered principal of the school, played by Robert Downey Jr. Charlie’s strangeness is a function of his sereneness. And though he loudly proclaims all the anxieties he shares with his growing numbers of acolytes, there is something saintly about it. What an odd, remarkable, likable kid, who uses his wealth and wits to create a “clique” that comes to encompass an entire school.
There are other movies in which the bully and the bullied join forces. In Bartlett, though, it happens in a particularly affecting and (almost) believable way. I’m not being very specific, mostly to encourage you to see the movie. All I’ll say is that I wish Charlie Bartlett had been in theaters when I was a kid.
I was also struck by the lesson, and I could be imagining things, about chemical dependency, which managed to be not even slightly preachy, and which intelligently weaved together pharmaceuticals and booze and the rage of a crowd. You come away from Charlie Bartlett wanting to be more in control of your life, and also wanting to be kinder, not least to your parents. The wish-fulfillment of most teen movies, and tween television, involves a world without adults, or in which adults are hilariously incompetent. Here we see imperfect adolescents and adults, bobbing and weaving around each other, all terrified of having their defensive barriers breached, and all fundamentally scared in the same ways.
I just read Stephen Holden’s lukewarm review, the only one I’ve read, and it occurs to me that the peripatetic nature of the movie was something I liked. This is not a clean, precise spectacle of a movie, like a Rushmore. It’s shaggy and it meanders at times. Threads are picked up and half-dropped. Even so, my sense is that it is truer to the experience of adolescence, and the way that home life, intimacy, and one’s evolving public persona interact and collide. My advice is: see it for yourself.
P.S.- As often happens, the comments are better than the post. Check out Freddie’s thoughts below.
I love Degrassi! It seems that I must see this movie.
— Nathan P. Origer · Feb 25, 12:55 AM · #
I was disappointed in it, though it had a lot of appealing parts. The fundamental problem with it, I guess, is similar to the problems with American Beauty (though I had many more problems with that movie than Charlie Bartlett). As other people noted, the problem with American Beauty, fundamentally, was that it tried to use the schema of tragedy, but refused to give Lester Burnham the actual human failing necessary for a tragic story. And though they’re obviously very different characters with very different narrative arcs, I found Burnham and Bartlett similarly unreal. They aren’t so much humans as suburban Bodhisattvas; even their neuroses seem to be somehow enlightened and impervious. The movie is careful (uh, SPOILER, I guess) to ensure that Charlie has his moment where he realizes that he’s not an adult, and can’t handle everything— but I felt that was least realized plot point in the movie. Why, after all, should Charlie feel that way, when the movie keeps him floating on air? Even when his plans go awry, I feel like the movie is afraid to criticize him or suggest that there are cracks in his weird kid/rich kid/enlightened kid armor.
And how much more interesting it would be, I thought, if SPOILER AGAIN there actually were psychotropic drugs in that bag Charlie brought for his girlfriend. After all, we’re either not supposed to think that it’s wrong for Charlie to hand out medication to his fellow students, or at least to believe that Charlie has no moral qualms about it himself. So why wouldn’t he give her psychotropic drugs? (It pissed me off that the movie insisted on making Downey Jr. the bad guy for looking in the bag, by the way. He knows Charlie dispenses medication to kids who haven’t been prescribed them by a doctor, and he sees Charlie give his daughter a bag from a pharmacy. And he’s wrong to want to know what’s in the bag?)
Don’t get me wrong, it was interesting, and there’s a bunch of great performances; I particularly like the job done by the actress who plays Charlie’s girlfriend. And there’s so many interesting ideas floating around in there that I was pretty entertained and engaged. I just wish the movie had a little more courage in its convictions. I think it would have been a better movie had the other students liked Charlie because of the medication, if when he had to stop giving them pills, he wasn’t still accepted by who he is. I’m also skeptical about the notion that teens don’t have anyone to talk to. Yes, it’s been eight years since I was in high school. But the problem, institutionally speaking, was never having someone to talk to. It was having the agency to apply what was learned in those talks to create meaningful change in one’s life.
I do certainly think that the movie asks us to be kinder, more empathetic creatures, and that’s a rare and great thing. And this I love, by the way:
it occurs to me that the peripatetic nature of the movie was something I liked. This is not a clean, precise spectacle of a movie, like a Rushmore. It’s shaggy and it meanders at times. Threads are picked up and half-dropped. Even so, my sense is that it is truer to the experience of adolescence, and the way that home life, intimacy, and one’s evolving public persona interact and collide.
I just wish you didn’t feel the need to include that “even so”! Give me shaggy hairy monsters, god. I’ve had enough of Aristotelean unities.
— Freddie · Feb 25, 01:42 AM · #
Not about the movie, but I found in high school, the problem was not agency, or lack of people to talk to, but 1) social stigma for having to use the safety net of “someone to talk to,” when all the normal kids didn’t need an institution to provide it, and 2) the institution being crippled in any capacity to give true advice. “You need to do what makes you happy,” “You need to confront him, talk about it, and then take it to an administrator,” etc., etc. Basically, an institution taking youth who were struggling socially and impressing on them the infallibility of the system and disconnecting happiness from self-reliance.
— bcg · Feb 25, 11:47 PM · #