Charming Charlie Bartlettis a memorable update of Ferris Bueller, writes Michael Dwyer.
CHARLIE BARTLETT
Directed by Jon Poll. Starring Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Robert Downey Jr., Kat Dennings, Tyler Hilton 16A cert, gen release, 96 min ****
IF EVER anyone makes a movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hope Davis has to be cast in the leading role. Not only is Davis a dead ringer for the senator when she was younger, but she has demonstrated an impressive range in movies from The Daytrippersto About Schmidt. However, just as Clinton has been overshadowed by a younger rival in Barack Obama, Davis cannot compete with the screen-stealing talent of Anton Yelchin, who plays the title character in Charlie Bartlett.
It's the second time they have played mother and son, following Hearts in Atlantis(2001), in which Yelchin landed his breakthrough role when he was 11. Born in Russia and raised in the US, Yelchin also gave a creditable performance as the abducted 15-year-old boy that was one of the few redeeming features of last year's Alpha Dog.
He brings an essential charisma to the role of Charlie Bartlett, a bright, precocious student who lives in affluence with his mother, Marilyn (Davis). Having been expelled from several private schools, he is enrolled at the local co-ed public school and driven there by the family chauffeur. As the only student wearing a jacket and tie, Charlie attracts the attention of two bullies who give him a black eye on his first day.
Tapping into the anxieties of his fellow teens, Charlie employs his charm and resourcefulness to become their amateur psychiatrist. His therapy sessions are in the school toilets, where he listens as the students pour out their problems in an adjacent stall. The set-up is identical to a confessional in a Catholic church.
He helps one boy who is painfully shy and suffers from depression, and he falls for another student, Susan (Kat Dennings), who tells him about her alcoholic father and adulterous mother. "How can I grow up to be remotely functional?" she asks in despair.
Susan's father happens to be the school principal (Robert Downey Jr.), who disapproves of her relationship with Charlie and his unorthodox behaviour. While the principal keeps a bottle of whisky in his office drawer, Charlie is deviously supplying the students with feel-good medication such as Ritalin and Prozac.
Charlie Bartlettinevitably invites - and comfortably withstands - comparison with Rushmoreand two movies featuring Matthew Broderick: as the wily, fun-loving student in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and as the moody school principal in Election.
The first feature film from director Jon Poll and screenwriter Gustin Nash, Charlie Bartlettis as risk-taking and irresistible as its protagonist. It judiciously blends knockabout comedy with humour that turns progressively darker as the film adopts a satirical, questioning view of psychiatry, the ease with which prescription drugs can be acquired, and their overuse in the modern world.
Here, for a refreshing change, is a movie about teens that isn't patronising or wallowing in self- pity, and one that treats its adult characters with sympathy rather than derision. Downey Jr. expressively captures the principal's deep sense of disillusionment, and Davis brings warmth to the movie in her unstated portrayal of Charlie's adoring mother.
Yelchin, a star in the making, oozes magnetic screen presence, both in his introspective scenes and when he demonstrates a gift for comedy, never more entertainingly than when, auditioning for a school production of Henry V, he performs a monologue, Confessions of a Teenage Renegade.
• Showing on the same programme is Simon Fitzmaurice's visually stylish short, The Sound of People, an intriguing meditation on life and death featuring rising actor Martin McCann.
