Cynical Cinema

Anton Yelchin is very good in Charlie Bartlett.  As the title character, and therefore star of the picture, he holds together a movie that really does not hold up on it’s own.  The movie opens with him being expelled from yet another private school, this time for laminating licenses illegally, and being taken home by his mom in a limo.  His family is fabulously wealthy, and he lives in a massive home with extremely fancy cars.  As Charlie says later, to his psychiatrist, “my family has a psychiatrist on call - how normal can I be?”  And that psychiatrist will figure prominently, albeit in a tangential way, throughout the rest of the movie.

Charlie is now forced to attend public school for the first time, and with his suit and tie and crest on his jacket, he immediately runs afoul of the school’s cartoon bully, played by Tyler Hilton.  However, he soon discovers that the medication his psychiatrist has prescribed for him, while it doesn’t do what it’s intended to do, is in high demand.  He figures he could hook up with this bully (the school drug dealer) in order to make some money and, by extension, some friends.  Clearly Charlie Bartlett doesn’t need money.  But he does need friends, and illegal enterprise has proven, we assume, thoughout his life, to provide him with those friends.

This is a venue that is never fully explored - how Charlie Bartlett is either a kid trying to make his way through the perils of “popularity” in high school, or perhaps he is a kid who is just smarter and wiser than all the other kids.  Toward the end of the film, that discrepancy is addressed, but in a fairly lame, conventional and unsatisfying way.  Robert Downey Jr. is underused as the school principal, who is a well-intentioned drunk whose life is falling apart.  He’s great in the role, his downward spiral coinciding almost exactly with Charlie Bartlett’s upward turn.  Which leads to, of course, a substantial confrontation between the two.  But again, Downey’s transformation is never fully explored, and is equally unsatisfying.

Really, this movie is very good until the midway point, as Charlie Bartlett becomes the coolest kid in school - providing psychiatric drugs and informal bathroom-stall counselling to his fellow high schoolers.  But the second half is so chaotic, and makes so little sense in spots, that it feels merely like a series of events that have little relation to each other.  And when the movie finally grinds to an end, the only word I can think of to use is “unsatisfying”.  The premise is good - the execution is flawed - and the finale is unsatisfying, at best.

Ryan Reynolds has saved some tragically bad movies from being…well…tragically bad. Most notably Van Wilder and Waiting, where his sense of comedic timing and his fantastic delivery elevate those two movies from the level of “awful” to the level of “not awful”. Since then, Reynolds seems to be attempting to distance himself from the funny-guy roles, like Van Wilder, and he seems to be willing to take just about any movie that won’t force him to smirk and say clever cute things to clever cute girls. The latest movie is called The Nines, and it is weird. Reynolds plays three different characters. One is a David Caruso-type actor who plays a cop on TV. Another is a writer for TV shows, and the third is a video game programmer. But still, somehow, all three characters are part of the same guy, and…well, you’ll have to see the whole movie to understand. Melissa McCarthy also plays three characters, including herself. Hope Davis appears as three people, as does Elle Fanning, the younger sister of Dakota Fanning. Sometimes she’s a mute little girl, sometimes she isn’t…although imdb and allmovie.com don’t have this listed, I’m convinced she was the little girl in the overalls in Kindergarten Cop.

This movie really does keep you guessing right up until the end, but it’s the end that sinks it. It won’t make you feel cheated, like the end of Perfect Stranger (which I just finished watching and which made me very angry, so I thought I’d mention it), but it certainly isn’t the big bang you would hope for and expect from a movie this complex and layered. There are some great moments in the film. When the Caruso-cop character has a Robert Downey type meltdown, tries to buy crack, hires a hooker to show him how to use crack, and then starts imagining his other personalities, it’s hilarious and a lot of fun. Another scene where the TV writer attacks his network executive, it is also a lot of fun. Hope Davis is good, although she keeps playing a woman who is supposed to be incredibly hot. And while she is certainly attractive, she is an eight, not a ten. Melissa McCarthy (Gilmore Girls) is terrific as a woman who figures in Reynolds’ life in the biggest possible way in each of the three scenarios.

The Nines is well worth your while if you are into the supernatural side of life and you don’t mind a fairly boring ending. Or, if you are desperated to find out what happened to the little girl in the overalls from Kindergarten Cop. Otherwise, it’s just kinda neat for a while.