Without even bothering to rearrange the
furniture, the wan comedy Charlie Bartlett lifts its scenario straight out of Rushmore: A frighteningly
self-assured teenager gets expelled from private school, shows up at an
ethnically diverse public school in his formal blue blazer, and eventually wins
over his skeptical new classmates through sheer force of personality. Yet the
differences between Charlie Bartlett and Rushmore's Max Fischer—and, by extension, between Charlie Bartlett and Rushmore—tell the story. The
grand, infectious creative vision that drives Rushmore's hero masks genuine vulnerability;
his wooing of a teacher twice his age may be misplaced whimsy, but the feelings
are real. By contrast, Anton Yelchin's blue-blooded troublemaker in Charlie
Bartlett
seems thoughtless and mechanical in his rebellion, even though he's dealing with
a father in jail for tax evasion and a mother (Hope Davis) wound tight as piano
wire. Yelchin plays him as a weirdo with an oddly mirthless grin, like a bad
seed who somehow slipped into adolescence without being exorcised first.
Booted from his latest private-school perch
for running a fake-ID operation, Yelchin looks alien to the plebes at his new
school, but like Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore, he's confident that
they'll conform to his way of doing things, not vice versa.† After a trip to the family's personal
psychiatrist earns him a bottomless prescription to Ritalin, Yelchin's
entrepreneurial spirit kicks in, and he hatches a plan to sell the drug to kids
looking for an easy high. With help from the school bully (Tyler Hilton), his
business expands into a broad range of pharmaceuticals, and he turns the school
bathroom into an amateur counseling office and pharmacy. As he quickly becomes
an almost messianic figure on campus, principal Robert Downey Jr. grows
concerned, doubly so once Yelchin and Downey's daughter (Kat Dennings) start
dating.
Charlie Bartlett panders to the notion
that adults don't understand kids, so they overmedicate them or surround them
with surveillance cameras to keep them in line. Yelchin is their Ferris
Bueller—and Downey Jr. the world's friendliest Mr. Rooney—yet it's
hard to believe that they would feel comfortable talking to him, because his
arch manner and elite social class put him at such a marked distance. Watching Charlie
Bartlett
only makes Wes Anderson's work seem more accomplished by comparison, because it
underscores that thin line separating the agreeably fanciful from the
overbearingly precious. Or rather, the difference between an inspired young
visionary and a kid who deserves every swirlie he's got coming to him.