yelchin

Oh, boo-hoo. Pity the misunderstood troubled teenagers of Charlie Bartlett, a comedy-drama-morality tale about an amoral young man who tries to be everyone’s friend by solving the deep-seated emotional problems of his fellow students through amateur psychiatric counseling and drugs that he prescribes from a stall in the boys’ restroom.

Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is a bright rich kid who has been kicked out of every prep school in Connecticut. Now he takes a bus to a public high school which, in Charlie Bartlett, is depicted as a nightmarish hell. There’s not a teacher in sight, only the inept principal (Robert Downey Jr.), who hates his job and doesn’t know how to control the roughnecks, with occasional visits by the school superintendent to tell him how inept he is.

But Charlie, raised in a mansion by a mother (Hope Davis) who thinks of him as an equal rather than as a son, tries to fit in with his fellow students who at first sneer at his prep school jacket, his tie and his well-pressed pants. But soon Charlie, low-key and direct, finds the key to popularity — even winning over the Mohawk-coiffed school bully (Tyler Hilton) — by dispensing advice to the emotionally messed up teens as well as reselling the drugs he has been prescribed by a string of psychiatrists he has visited, pretending to them that he has the problems of his school clients.

Charlie Bartlett is a fantasy that panders to high school teens. Besides there being no teachers at West Summit High School, there are no parents beyond Charlie’s clueless mother and Principal Gardner, whose vivaciously independent-minded daughter, Susan (Kat Dennings), begins to fall for Charlie’s offbeat charms. Yet the film, about all the problems of those woebegone teens, has eliminated its core audience with its R rating because of the extensive use of drugs, profanity, sexual encounters and hard-edged violence.

Yet, except for one boy who is down in the dumps because he’s friendless, the biggest problem these teens face is the school board’s decision to install surveillance cameras in the “student lounge” (actually a shack on the backside of the campus). They see this as an invasion of their privacy and the opportunity to be alone among their kind. Revolt is in the air.

Perhaps the most startling thing in Charlie Bartlett, however, Yelchin being something of a quiet, shadowy figure, is Downey’s loud warning late in the movie about the dangers of drug abuse. Well, he ought to know.

**Charlie Bartlett

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jr., Hope Davis, Kat Dennings, Tyler Hilton.

Rated: R, contains drugs, violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com